Sir, —In connection with Micheál Ó Siochrú’s September/October article ‘The curse of Cromwell’, you may be interested in a few more points about the Cromwell statue at Westminster, most of which I picked up while doing research on the Irish Independent of the 1890s (when it was the paper of the Parnellite party). The proposal … Read more
Sir,—In an earlier letter (HI 20.5, Sept./Oct. 2012) I suggested that the last lines of Tomás Rua Ó Suilleabháin’s praise-poem ‘Sé Domhnall Binn Ó Conaill caoin’ amounted to an unambiguous aspiration to ethnic cleansing (‘go nglanfar cruinn as Éilge iad’). In taking me to task on this (in surprisingly intemperate tones), Niall Gillespie (HI 20.6, … Read more
Thomas D’Arcy McGee: passion, reason, and politics, 1825–1857, vol. I David A. Wilson (McGill–Queen’s University Press, $39.95) ISBN 9780773533578 Now a somewhat obscure figure, Thomas D’Arcy McGee is a prime subject for scholarly biography. As author David A. Wilson’s concluding paragraph notes, McGee went from extreme Irish republican to extreme Irish American Catholic to extreme … Read more
Sir,—I read with interest the article on the American Civil War by Kevin Haddick Flynn (HI 20.5, Sept./Oct. 2012). I should like, however, to correct some factual errors in the article, the first being that William Mitchel was John Mitchel’s eldest son. He was in fact his youngest and a private in the 1st Virginia … Read more
Fenians, freedmen, and Southern whites: race and nationality in the era of Reconstruction Mitchell Snay (Louisiana State University Press, $40) ISBN 9780807132739What do Southern Klansmen, their politically aroused former slaves and American-based Irish nationalists have in common? Not a lot, it turns out. Mitchell Snay aspires in this ambitious comparative study to tease out a … Read more