Nick Maxwell In recent years Irish scholars have become increasingly appreciative of early maps as a record of past landscapes, past geographical knowledge (and ignorance) and past geopolitical attitudes. To appreciate this trend one need only consider the successive fascicles of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas, the numerous early-map facsimiles in the Atlas of the Irish rural … Read more
In the 1940s Myles na gCopaleen in his ‘Crushkeen Lawn’ column in the Irish Times denounced de Valera for wasting taxpayers’ money on the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, whose only purpose, claimed Myles, was to prove that there was no God and two St Patricks. What had provoked his ire were two lectures: one … Read more
Thomas Kearney’s 1817 map of the Levinge estate in Knockdrin, Co. Westmeath, is a particularly fine example of an early nineteenth-century survey of an improving landlord’s estate during the twilight era of landlord paternalism in Ireland. So-called ‘improving landlords’ were committed to implementing the latest scientific developments to modernise their estates in terms of animal … Read more
Illinois native Margaret Hallem was checking up on her Irish roots at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC when she mentioned her grandmother, who had been due to sail on the doomed White Star liner Titanic but missed the trip owing to bad weather. She then revealed that her family still had the ticket—one … Read more
Charter schools were intended to solve the problem facing a victorious people taking over a defeated, impoverished country from the 1690s onwards. With almost a quarter of the Irish population killed or exiled, the rest were needed as a labour force for the new masters of the land. Yet how was it possible to trust … Read more