Nick Maxwell The late 1720s and early 1730s were a period of economic despair in Ireland, as trade stagnated and a succession of poor harvests brought famine and disease. Against this background, anger at bankers and a general distrust of the ‘monied’ section in society became recurring themes in a vigorous pamphlet literature, which considered the causes … Read more
The pamphlet was the most important vehicle for public debate in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland. Pamphlets published in the period between the mid-1720s and the Lucas affair of 1749 were notable for the prominence given to economic issues. The British connection, which had been central to pamphlet debate in Ireland in the early part of the eighteenth … Read more
On the morning of 18 August 1848, in the town of Santos Lugares in the north-west of the Buenos Aires province, two figures sat side by side, tied to chairs and blindfolded in front of a firing squad. Death did not come instantly. The soldiers were nervous and failed to shoot straight, for they knew … Read more
The American Civil War was the first great conflict of the industrial age and developed many of the technological, economic and political features that were to transform later warfare. Superior military leadership enabled the weaker Confederacy to keep the Union forces at bay for four years, but ultimately Napoleon’s aphorism that ‘God is on the … Read more
Union leaders were initially reluctant to establish ethnically based units but were soon swayed by the attractions of enhanced Irish recruitment to a brigade with its own Irish commanders. Significantly, Irish involvement meant the acceptance—for the first time in American life—of a large Catholic force. The brigade’s chief chaplain, Fr William Corby (later president of … Read more