A stone monument was publicly dedicated to John Neilson in Maplewood Cemetery, Charlottesville, Virginia on 17 April 1999. Born in Ballycarry, County Antrim in the 1770s, he was apprenticed to the architect Hunter in Belfast. In 1798, Neilson was banished for seven years for his part in the rebellion; a brother Samuel was banished for … Read more
Theobald Wolfe Tone (TWT) was born in 1763 and died in 1798. In 1963 the late Theodore William Moody (TWM) projected a definitive scholarly edition of TWT’s writings and in 1998 the first of three volumes reached the book shops. Tone, in other words, managed to pack three volumes-worth into his short life. Evidently the … Read more
Sir,—I greatly enjoyed your Summer 1998edition dedicated to the 1798 rebellion. I discovered aspects new to meand interpretations which challenged my conceptions based as they wereon, In the county of Wexford those rebels did rise, All brave Orangemen they thought they’d sacrifice…. Tofind that Scullabogue barn is little known in (local) popular historyand that Church … Read more
Thomas Davis, writing in the 1840s, urged his readers to ‘seek for histories’, ‘create museums’ and ‘study the manners of the dead’ in order to ‘create for the future’, the museum enthusiast can only whole-heartily agree. The museum exhibition is now one of the pre-requisites of commemoration and indeed serves a purpose which no textbook, … Read more
In 1810, the radical journalist Watty Cox accompanied a lead article in his Irish Magazine on Lord Edward Fitzgerald with a crude yet dramatic woodcut of the famous arrest of the United Irishman on 18 May 1798. The woodcut conflates the events of Fitzgerald’s capture as they occurred at 135 Thomas Street, Dublin, the home … Read more