News stories

International Conference on Hunger An international conference on hunger, featuring nearly fifty speakers—including Homi K. Bhabha, Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane, among many others—will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine on 19 and 20 May 1995, at New York University’s Loeb Student Center. Sponsored by the Glucksman Ireland House, a centre for Irish … Read more

Personal narratives as historical sources: the journal of Elizabeth Smith 1840-1850

Janet K. TeBrake     Among the many resources available for historical study and research on nineteenth-century Ireland are the numerous personal narratives by women, the most common form of writing women have traditionally produced. One of the earliest and best known of the genre is the diary of Mary Leadbetter. Another noteworthy example is … Read more

‘A Star Chamber affair’: the death of Timothy Coughlan

Gabriel Doherty   It is a dry, frosty January night in Dublin. Suddenly the silence of a suburban street is shattered by the sound of automatic gunfire: it appears that an IRA man has been shot dead while attempting to assassinate a police detective as he returns home from work. However, the situation turns more … Read more

Re-presenting war: the Somme Heritage Centre

David Officer A ration party of the Royal Irish Rifles resting in a communications trench at the Somme, 1 July 1916. Historians of Ireland regularly harp on about the often blunt and crude forms in which the past is mobilised by contemporary interests. However, historians themselves pay scant attention to the forms, methods and media … Read more

Languedoc in Laois: The Huguenots of Portarlington

John S. Powell   It was a sure sign that the Huguenot plantation of Portarlington in County Laois was dead when a historian turned it into an article (Sir Erasmus Borrowes in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1855). Previously the town had seemed a curiosity of the Irish midlands, a hangover from seventeenth-century religious … Read more