Kate Connolly, the Irish immigrant narrator in a semi-fictional novel, saw an Afro-Argentine peach-seller in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires and remarked upon the ‘tall black woman with a woolly head’, commenting that she had seen a peach before but never an African person. The majority of forced African immigrants arrived on the shores of the River … Read more
British identity and citizenship were of great importance to the nucleus of British and Irish residents in the city of Buenos Aires during the nineteenth century. This variety of British subjectship was an identity that many in Ireland were domestically uncomfortable with yet appropriated for economic and social advantage in Argentina. Part of the informal … Read more
professional and educated classes Charles O’Shaughnessy (1826/7–1911?) was a Kilfinane (Co. Limerick) draper with a taste for the polemical, as this stanza from one of his advertising jingles suggests. He was a prolific pamphleteer on a wide variety of subjects. The pamphlets were available post-free and came with the confident guarantee that ‘No money is … Read more
Frederic William Burton was born in 1816 in Corofin, Co. Clare, the third son of an amateur landscape painter. The family moved to Dublin, where in 1826 Burton attended the Dublin Society Schools, starting out as a painter of miniatures and portraits. He mixed in antiquarian circles that included George Petrie, Samuel Ferguson, Eugene O’Curry, … Read more
What is the origin of the word ‘brasil’? In my homeland, Brazil, it seems that everyone knows the answer. Following the definition of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, it comes from brasa and is associated with the reddish colour of brazilwood (pau-brasil in Portuguese), a dyewood tree commonly found along the Atlantic coast of … Read more