Cork was the first of Ireland’s cities to adopt the Public Libraries Act in the mid-nineteenth century. The city’s main library was housed in a variety of locations between 1892 and 1930, but when Corkonians think of the ‘City Library’ they think of the landmark building on the Grand Parade, opened in September 1930. The … Read more
Biddy Early died on the afternoon of 22 April 1874 in a small, two-roomed mud cottage overlooking Kilbarron Lake in Feakle, Co. Clare. Her life story was first published in 1903, with dark tales of witchcraft continuing to swirl around her memory ever since. In the 1970s an attempt to secure funding for a newly renovated … Read more
In 1888 Cecil Rhodes, an Englishman living in South Africa, donated £10,000 to Charles Stewart Parnell. His motive for contributing to a cause to which he had no emotional attachment is curious. The answer may lie in the manner in which Rhodes’s political ambitions were dependent on the Home Rule bill, and therefore on Parnell. … Read more
With an estimated four million people by the 1770s, Ireland had undergone a population explosion that made Dublin the second-largest city, after London, in the British Empire. Nevertheless, despite this growth, in terms of infrastructure Ireland’s capital city remained a small, densely populated, essentially medieval city, akin to contemporary Paris. Just as would happen in … Read more
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