The dramatic news that transcripts of controversial recordings are to be handed over to the PSNI in Northern Ireland has sent shock waves through American academia. Although it was never certain whether researchers had the authority to guarantee total confidentiality or binding terms of information disclosure, the prising open of a closed archive with a … Read more
United Nations Photo Archive United Nations Photo Archive United Nations Photo Archive Frank Aiken cuts a colossal figure in twentieth-century Irish history. But in 2006, when RTÉ broadcast a documentary on him as part of its ‘Hidden History’ series, sectarian killings in County Down featured most prominently (reviewed in HI 15.1, Jan./Feb. 2007). Clearly, in … Read more
John Ruddy was allegedly murdered or died of cholera in the US in 1832, at the age of eighteen. He had been one of 57 young men from counties Donegal, Tyrone and Derry who had been employed in 1832 by Philip Duffy, an Irish-American contractor, to lay railroad tracks in Pennsylvania for the Philadelphia … Read more
A friend of mine got a text the other day—‘The wicked witch is dead’. It wasn’t until she tuned in to the news that evening that she realised that this wasn’t a cryptic reference to the Wizard of Oz but to the death (the result of a stroke) of an 87-year-old woman who had suffered … Read more
May 3 1933 The Constitution (Removal of Oath) Act removed the oath of allegiance to the British Crown from the Constitution of the Irish Free State. 5 1953 Robert Lloyd Praeger (87), botanist, best remembered for The way that I went (1939), an account of his travels around Ireland, died. 8 1913 Sigerson Clifford, writer … Read more