The artist

Frederic William Burton was born in 1816 in Corofin, Co. Clare, the third son of an amateur landscape painter. The family moved to Dublin, where in 1826 Burton attended the Dublin Society Schools, starting out as a painter of miniatures and portraits. He mixed in antiquarian circles that included George Petrie, Samuel Ferguson, Eugene O’Curry, … Read more

‘Hang up half a dozen bankers’:attitudes to bankers in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland

The late 1720s and early 1730s were a period of economic despair in Ireland, as trade stagnated and a succession of poor harvests brought famine and disease. Against this background, anger at bankers and a general distrust of the ‘monied’ section in society became recurring themes in a vigorous pamphlet literature, which considered the causes … Read more

Pamphleteering in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland

The pamphlet was the most important vehicle for public debate in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland. Pamphlets published in the period between the mid-1720s and the Lucas affair of 1749 were notable for the prominence given to economic issues. The British connection, which had been central to pamphlet debate in Ireland in the early part of the eighteenth … Read more

‘Where the murderin’ cannons roar . . .’: The American Civil War

The American Civil War was the first great conflict of the industrial age and developed many of the technological, economic and political features that were to transform later warfare. Superior military leadership enabled the weaker Confederacy to keep the Union forces at bay for four years, but ultimately Napoleon’s aphorism that ‘God is on the … Read more