Miller’s crossing

PF: To what extent was a sense of Irish ethnicity a factor drawing you towards an academic interest in Irish Studies and particularly Irish migration? KM: Only in retrospect. Being born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, one primarily thought of oneself as being white as against others who were not. There was a much less … Read more

Pigs, Paddies, prams and petticoats: Irish Home Rule and the British comic press, 1886–93

The Irish question was a constant source of concern and debate in the nineteenth-century British press, but perhaps never more so than in the mid-1880s and early 1890s, when almost every newspaper and journal offered extensive commentary on the first two Irish Home Rule bills. Comic weeklies such as Punch, Fun and Judy were no … Read more

The origins and nature of Fascism and Nazism in Europe

In March 1919 Benito Mussolini, a socialist turned nationalist, founded a new movement in Milan that became known as ‘fascism’. The fasces—a bound bundle of sticks—had been a symbol of republican unity in ancient Rome. For Mussolini they signified the unity of the nation, and in particular the incorporation into Italy of all Italian-speaking territories … Read more

‘The Londonderry Herr’: Lord Londonderry and the appeasement of Nazi Germany

The term ‘appeasement’ remains as much a slur today as it was in the 1940s. Yet appeasement is far from unusual in politics, although owing to the negativity surrounding ‘appeasement’ we now prefer to use words like ‘compromise’ and ‘accommodation’. Our detailed knowledge of Nazi Germany (1933–45), in particular its project to exterminate European Jews, … Read more