Nick Maxwell It is quite well known that the Orange Order is found outside the British Isles in areas with diaspora and colonial/ Commonwealth connections, such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Its presence on the African continent is less commonly appreciated. Orangeism had a long history in South Africa, developing in the early nineteenth century and … Read more
African history should be part of the core curriculum of the history syllabus in all our schools, all our third-level institutions. It should be an integral part of history as it is taught in Ireland, available to every student who wants to pursue it. That may seem an extravagant assertion, but in the era of … Read more
This book is its author’s interpretation of documents from Spanish sources concerning Hugh O’Neill during the period 1602-1616. Previous writers, such as Sean Ó Faoláin, had to rely on sparse and hostile English sources which portrayed him during his exile in Rome as a man cowed by defeat, blind, drunk, melancholic, an image these documents … Read more
Among the different instruments of power wielded by empire-builders, maps might be considered as special forms of evidence in state formation: symbolic representations of expanding colonial influence. The mapping of Africa is synonymous with its conquest and domination. From the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese first navigated the West African coast, cartographers imposed order upon … Read more
Longmans have launched the first of a six-volume History of Ireland with a synthesis of the last twenty years of Early Christian scholarship. It is an uneven book, relying for source material primarily on Latin manuscripts, and while it is hardly a serious setback for the progress of early Irish historical studies, it is not … Read more