Nick Maxwell TIMOTHY MURTAGH Liverpool University Press £95 ISBN 97810802077148 Reviewed by Jim Smyth Jim Smyth is Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. Irish society and economy in the period 1776–1820 were, of course, overwhelmingly rural, and historians have duly reflected those past realities. By comparison, however, Irish urban history has until fairly recently received … Read more
EDWARD COLEMAN, PAUL DUFFY and TADHG O’KEEFFE (eds) Four Courts Press €44 ISBN 9781846828614 Reviewed by Grace O’Keeffe Grace O’Keeffe is History Ireland’s online editor. Edward Coleman opens this volume with a historiographical examination of scholarship on Ireland’s involvement in the crusades, a relatively small field of study. The most obvious reason for this is … Read more
PATRICK MANNION and FEARGHAL McGARRY (eds) New York University Press $35 ISBN 9781479808892 Reviewed by John Horne Ernie O’Malley concluded his classic memoir of the War of Independence, On another man’s wound, with the words: ‘so ended […] what we called the scrap; the people, later on, the trouble; and others, fond of labels, the … Read more
By Joe Culley @TheRealCulls It is late 1864 and the American Civil War rages towards its conclusion. General Sherman and his troops are marching through Georgia to convince the inhabitants of the error of their ways. And so it is that Thomas Conolly, Irish MP, ruminating on affairs at his demesne in Castletown House, Co. … Read more
By Fiona Brennan The playwright, poet and short-story writer Sigerson Clifford is perhaps best known as the author of the ballad ‘The Boys of Barr na Sráide’. He was born in Cork City in 1913, but his parents, Mary Anne Sigerson and Michael Clifford, were originally from Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry, and returned there with their … Read more