Nick Maxwell Craniology was another ‘science’ that dealt with the human skull, in this case an attempt to characterise different ethnic groups—human races—by measurements of their skulls, having previously defined fixed anatomical landmarks on its surface. While the American Civil War raged on the issue of slavery in the 1860s, some supporters of slavery in Britain—initially concentrated … Read more
Phrenology assumed that if someone had a tendency to act in a certain way, for instance admiring the landscape, the part of the brain building up the aesthetic experience would be well developed to support such over-activity, at the expense of a diminished development of some other area. This differential brain development would be reflected—they … Read more
By Fiona Fitzsimons After 1649 and continuing until 1853, many convicted felons from Ireland were transported overseas to serve their sentences as indentured servants. Initially transportation was to the thirteen colonies in North America, and to a lesser extent to the island colonies in the British Caribbean. By the early eighteenth century the Caribbean ‘sugar … Read more
Reviewed by Joe Cully Jackie Uí Chionna, He was Galway: Máirtín Mór McDonogh, 1860–1934 (Open Air/Four Courts Press, €19.95 pb, 304pp, ISBN 9781846826252). Mick Moloney, Across the western ocean: songs of leaving and arriving (Quinnipiac University Press/Cork University Press, €17.95 pb including CD, 56pp, ISBN 9780997837438). Angela Bourke, Voices underfoot: memory, forgetting, and oral verbal … Read more
Sir,—Eoin Gill’s thought-provoking article (HI 24.5, Sept./Oct. 2016, Platform) asks: ‘Has science also been airbrushed out of Irish history?’. A similar concern was part of the decision by the minister for finance and the Central Bank to issue a series of silver proof coins celebrating ‘Irish Science and Invention’. Coins celebrating Ernest Walton (2016) and … Read more