It has long been known that a valuable collection of untraced Fitzgerald material existed. Thomas Moore had access to it for his 1831 biography of Lord Edward and it was also drawn on by Gerald Campbell for his biography of Edward and Pamela in 1904. It had been assumed that these papers had been destroyed, … Read more
TC: Could you tell us something about your background? MH: I did my degree in history at the University of Bristol and got my first job as a research assistant in the Imperial War Museum. Military history had been a speciality of mine. From the Imperial War Museum I moved to the Horniman and eventually … Read more
Throughout its history the Irish communist movement had extensive links and relations with Soviet Russia. In the 1920s and 1930s the main point of contact was the Communist International (Comintern) based in Moscow. During the interwar period Irish communists like Roddy Connolly, Jim Larkin snr, Jack Carney and Sean Murray attended many international conferences in … Read more
The approach of the millennium risks overshadowing the fact that 1999 is a fin de siècle year. Despite the predictable onset of millennium fever, the passage of a century is a more meaningful historical event. It is difficult to make any sense of a thousand years of history. Centuries contain more manageable slices of time. … Read more
The journalist Frankfort Moore, writing in 1914 about events he witnessed in the late nineteenth century, described the Belfast riots of 1886 as being ‘closely akin to actual warfare’. Notwithstanding his touch of hyperbole, the riots were costly in human and financial terms: thirty-two people died, hundreds of people were injured and some £90,000 worth … Read more