An eighteenth-century Whig dressed in ill-fitting nineteenth-century Tory clothing? Seán Patrick Donlan assesses the hotly contested legacy of Edmund Burke For two centuries the legacy of Edmund Burke has been hotly contested and arguably distorted by apologists and opponents alike. In his day, the London press caricatured him as a whiskey-toting Jesuit, managing to combine … Read more
Was cricket in late nineteenth-century Ireland really an élitist activity limited to the middle and upper classes? Tom Hunt assesses the evidence for County Westmeath. In July 1893 members of the Ringtown Cricket Club, Co. Westmeath, assembled on the shores of Lough Derravaragh to make the journey across the lake to play a match against … Read more
Sir, —In his rather superficial discussion of the JFK assassination in the last issue (HI 11.4, Winter 2003), Mel Ayton matches the wilder speculations of the conspiracy theorists with some of his own. Among these is his unqualified assertion of the most fantastic of the conclusions of the Warren Report—the so-called ‘single bullet theory’. … Read more
Sir, —Jim Jordan (Letters, HI 11.4, Winter 2003) has provided useful background on the ethnic conflicts that partly lay behind the New York draft riots (see my article in HI 11.3, Autumn 2003). It is of course quite normal to embed the riots in a wider narrative like Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish became white. … Read more
Commencing with the current issue, subscribers to History Ireland will receive an insert based on the Irish Historic Towns Atlas (IHTA) series, starting with medieval Dublin. The IHTA project was set up in the early 1980s, inspired by an already successful wider European venture that had been established in 1955 under the auspices of … Read more