As Ireland’s historians have duelled through contentious and sometimes acrimonious debate in recent years about new research and revisions concerning Irish history, historians in the United States have been engaged in a transformation of studies about the past of the Irish in America. Their differences have not been so loudly declaimed or headlined as those … Read more
On the evening of 18 April 1894 a triumphant Horace Plunkett wrote in his diary: The meeting to inaugurate the lAOS [Irish Agricultural Organisation Society] came off and was brilliantly successful. About 250 present and thoroughly representative of all sides of Irish life. I spoke for 1 1/4 hours & spoke well. The movement is … Read more
In 1324, Richard Ledrede, bishop of Ossory, declared that his diocese was a hotbed of devil worshippers. The central figure in this affair was Alice Kyteler, a wealthy Kilkenny woman who stood accused of witchcraft by her stepchildren. It was the first witchcraft trial to treat the accused as heretics and the first to accuse … Read more
The Terry Alt movement of 1828-31 has been one of I the least studied of pre-Famine rural revolts, partly because it was dwarfed by the great anti-tithe agitation with which it temporarily shared the stage at the outset of the 1830s. The name itself is obscure. According to the traveller John Barrow, writing in 1836, … Read more
The Blueshirts are best remembered as Ireland’s fascists, and as such there has been a tendency not to examine the broader activities of the movement. Between the image of a non-constitutional army, and the highly important role the Blueshirts played in the formation of the entirely constitutional Fine Gael, historians have struggled to give the … Read more