Nick Maxwell ‘It rarely pays to get between a dog and a lamp-post’, remarked United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull on the virtues of neutrality. For Dante, ‘the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality’. Was Ireland right to stay neutral in the Second World … Read more
In January 2011, while working at the British National Archives at Kew, Dr Tom Truxes (Glucksman Ireland House and NYU) discovered a fragile, dusty collection of documents that had been seized aboard an Irish trading vessel in March 1757. A British privateer had intercepted the Two Sisters of Dublin on its return to Ireland from … Read more
September Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. —W.B. Yeats, September 1913 … Read more
Irish society has woken up to the fact that some historically important centenaries are almost upon us: the Easter Rising and the period leading up to it (1913–16), the First World War (1914–18) and the War of Independence/Civil War (1919–23). This awareness is evident in the pages of History Ireland and other journals, on the … Read more
n A major historical fraud has been uncovered thanks to Google and an amateur detective, John Paul Floyd from Glasgow. The Vinland map caused a stir when it came to light in 1957 because it purported to be a Viking map of North America—in other words, proof that the hardy Norsemen had got there centuries … Read more