Nick Maxwell Recent discoveries of Scandinavian settlement remains at Woodstown, Co. Waterford, have produced great excitement, and not a little hyperbole. Settlements such as this are described as longphuirt or longphorts in the present literature. But what exactly was a longphort? Michael Gibbons investigates. The early stages of Scandinavian settlement in Ireland and Britain remain difficult … Read more
Despite the enormous wealth of sources, and much superb ethnic historiography over the course of two centuries, the story of 1798 and the United Irish diaspora has consistently escaped the attention of mainstream political historians. One obvious example was the prodigious nineteenth-century biographer R.R. Madden who invariably concluded his memoirs of numerous United Irish exiles … Read more
The third conference of the European Association of Urban Historians was held at the Central European University, Budapest, on 29-31 August 1996 where papers dealt with a variety of aspects of the European city from early modern times to the twentieth century. The key-note speech by Professor Heinz Schilling (Humboldt University, Berlin), delivered in Budapest … Read more
In October the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland released 3,000 files of the old Stormont Ministry of Home Affairs dealing with the period 1921-1962 and previously embargoed on grounds of sensitivity. The files include the highly sensitive ‘S’ (Secret Series) files covering such subjects as the 1920s Troubles, internment (case files for individual internees … Read more
During the nineteenth century, about 40,000 emigrants left Ireland to colonise the lush yet deserted Argentine pampas and laid the foundation for a flourishing Irish-Argentine community. Edmundo Murray tracks the journey from their home counties and their mode of transport. Most of the Irish emigrants bound for Argentina came from two areas, the coastline of … Read more