Kilmainham Gaol, now long established as a national monument, is a unique resource in the study of Irish history. Every year many thousands of visitors make their way there, most often as a result of the effusive recommendation of inhabitants of the capital city, to absorb something of Irish social, penal and political history in … Read more
Referring to events in and around Trinity College early on the Tuesday of Easter 1916, in a letter to William Hugh Blake conserved in the archives of Trinity College and dated 10 May 1916, Gerard Fitzgibbon writes: ‘One thing that terrified [us] was early on Tuesday morning, just after dawn. Three of their dispatch riders … Read more
One hundred years ago, on the night of Saturday 13 August 1910, three passengers travelling from New York disembarked from the White Star Line’s steamer Baltic at what was then called Queenstown, now Cobh, with a device that was revolutionising how people viewed the world: the cinematograph or cine-camera. This device had existed for fifteen … Read more
Vietnam seemed an unlikely arena for what would become ‘Johnson’s War’, but the US had been engaged in south-east Asia since World War II. In 1940 France lost control of its colony, Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam), to Japan. A Vietnamese independence movement, comprised of intellectuals and nationalists, was determined to resist the return of … Read more
Family and early years Ysidro Francis Edgeworth’s grandfather, Richard, was a utilitarian, following the philosopher Bentham in believing that sensory pleasure and pain are everything and that morally correct actions maximise a population’s happiness, defined as aggregate pleasure minus pain. The moral code should be deduced from this maximisation principle and not from ‘truths’ … Read more