By Joe Culley @TheRealCulls It’s a familiar story, almost a cliché: in the 1880s a young woman from a large family leaves the struggling farm in Sligo to emigrate to New York. There she finds work as a domestic servant, a ‘Biddy’, dutifully sends home remittances, makes an unhappy marriage, has children, and through hard … Read more
Reviewed by Colum Kenny Colum Kenny is the author of A bitter winter: the Civil War and its legacy (Eastwood Books, 2022). In this final session of his series of Machnamh seminars, ‘Memory, History and Imagination’, President Michael D. Higgins said that he wished he could report that his anti-Treaty father and his pro-Treaty uncle … Read more
CIARÁN CASEY Institute of Public Administration €35 ISBN 978910393437 Reviewed by Felix M. Larkin Felix M. Larkin is a historian and a former official of the Department of Finance. When Ronan Fanning was writing his history of the Department of Finance in the 1970s, someone remarked that its opening sentence should be: ‘In the beginning … Read more
TIMOTHY MURTAGH Liverpool University Press £95 ISBN 97810802077148 Reviewed by Jim Smyth Jim Smyth is Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. Irish society and economy in the period 1776–1820 were, of course, overwhelmingly rural, and historians have duly reflected those past realities. By comparison, however, Irish urban history has until fairly recently received … Read more
EDWARD COLEMAN, PAUL DUFFY and TADHG O’KEEFFE (eds) Four Courts Press €44 ISBN 9781846828614 Reviewed by Grace O’Keeffe Grace O’Keeffe is History Ireland’s online editor. Edward Coleman opens this volume with a historiographical examination of scholarship on Ireland’s involvement in the crusades, a relatively small field of study. The most obvious reason for this is … Read more