18th–19th – Century History

British High Politics and Nationalist Ireland, Margaret O’Callaghan and Ideology and the Irish Question, Paul Bew (3:1)

British High Politics and Nationalist Ireland: criminality, land and the law under Foster and Balfour Margaret O’Callaghan (Cork University Press, £30hb, £15.95pb) Ideology and the Irish Question: Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism 1912-1916 Paul Bew (Clarendon Press, £20) (3:1) Reviewed by Martin Mansergh In Ireland, history is ideology. Over the last few decades, historians of … Read more

Personal narratives as historical sources: the journal of Elizabeth Smith 1840-1850 (3:1)

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 the journal … Read more

‘A Star Chamber affair’: the death of Timothy Coughlan (3:1)

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 sinister … Read more

Languedoc in Laois: The Huguenots of Portarlington (3:1)

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 wars. … Read more

Epidemic Diseases of the Great Famine

Famine can be defined as a failure of food production or distribution, resulting in dramatically increased mortality. In Ireland between 1845 and 1849, general starvation and disease were responsible for more than 1,000,000 excess deaths, most of them attributable to fever, dysentery and smallpox. These three highly contagious diseases, which had long been endemic in … Read more