f On 7–8 June 2007 a group of emerging scholars and established academics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds (history, English, French, Irish) gathered at the University of Limerick to discuss print culture in the eighteenth century. The linchpin of the event was a lecture by the well-known American cultural historian Robert Darnton. The conference … Read more
From about 1730 Ireland experienced a series of communications developments that pro-foundly altered the opportunities to move around the island. Road, canal and, later, rail initiatives meant that by about 1860 a communications revolution had occurred. A wide-ranging ‘time–space compression’, as it is termed by some geographers, radically reduced the time, and to some extent … Read more
Sir, —I read with interest D. R. O’Connor Lysaght’s letter in the lastissue on the different strands of Irish nationalist thought dealt within the previous (March/April 2007) issue. I think he misinterpreted thetheme of my short piece on John O’Leary, however, which was concernedsolely with analysing why Yeats came to associate O’Leary with apoetical idea … Read more
Sir,—First of all may I compliment you on the excellent layout of my article on ‘Captain’ Boycott in your last issue (HI 19.1, Jan./Feb. 2011). The featured photo of Boycott’s house at Keem was provided by a student of the Achill Archaeological School, Connie Harrison, and she had requested that she be credited in the … Read more
In the 1880s many, including Dr Thomas W. Croke, archbishop of Cashel, maintained that ‘ball-playing, hurling, football-kicking according to Irish rules . . . may now be said to be not only dead and buried, but in several localities to be entirely forgotten. What the country needed was an Irish organisation to bring order and … Read more