This article uses inventory evidence for the possessions of households in later fifteenth-century County Dublin, an area largely characterised by rural settlement. Because household goods are often only indifferently recorded, its focus is less on individual cases than on larger patterns of consumption between social groups. In particular, by making comparisons with inventories from later medieval England and from the wine-growing Gers region of south-west France in the mid fifteenth century, it explores both how far evidence from County Dublin fits within and helps suggest wider European ‘peasant’ and ‘bourgeois’ patterns of consumption. By extension it explores the boundaries between the urban and the rural and how far a hybrid suburban identity can be discerned. In some cases a combination of close reading and statistical analysis is used to recover occupational identities, something that the source does not specifically record. The significance of the material culture of specific households is examined in two instances — one that of Lady Margaret Nugent, a wealthy and devout widow living in Dublin's St Michan's parish, and the other that of a couple who managed an inn located next to one of the city gates.

In 1064, Donnchad mac Briain, son of Brian Bóroma and deposed claimant to the kingship of Ireland, went on pilgrimage to Rome, where he was buried in the important basilica and martyr shrine of S. Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian Hill. More than a century later, in the transformative period 1176–1203 which followed the English conquest of Ireland, the papal legati a latere sent with full legatine authority and jurisdiction in Ireland appear to have been drawn exclusively from the church of S. Stefano. This article first considers the circumstances and symbolism of Donnchad's pilgrimage and burial, alongside its long-term impact on Hiberno-Papal relations and on the papacy's conceptions of Irish sovereignty in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It also explores the careers and missions of the cardinal priests and papal legates of S. Stefano to the peripheries of Latin Christendom in the long twelfth century, including at least one legate in Ireland, Gerard, who has hitherto awaited formal identification. Based on the legatine evidence, it suggests that in the decades of the English invasion, the papacy began using the burial site of the heir to arguably the last effective king of Ireland as part of a conscious and consistent rhetorical strategy, allowing it to dispose matters of sovereignty in Ireland.

In 1610, just over fifty men were granted hundreds of thousands of acres of land as part of the estates allocated to English undertakers in the Ulster Plantation in the counties of Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone. Exactly who these individuals were and why they were given estates remains understudied. This article closely explores the process whereby lands were petitioned for by consortiums of individuals in 1609 and early 1610, before assessing who, from amongst the well over 100 applicants, were actually granted lands. Where possible, it considers the background of many these individuals, their ties to the court and officials in England and Ireland, and their material resources. It also highlights how the applicants for lands who had the greatest financial means to make a success of it were generally ignored in favour of petitioners whose ability, from a material perspective, to implement the articles of plantation was highly dubious, something which many senior officials, such as the viceroy of Ireland, Arthur Chichester, had been anxious to avoid.

During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Ulster lordship of Tír Eoghain was bitterly contested between two rival branches of the Uí Néill dynasty: the Clann Éinrí Aimhréidh and the Clann Briain Catha an Dúin. Traditionally, historians have focused mainly on the local origins and ramifications of this feud and have paid only cursory attention to how events ranging from the Shannon Estuary through to the Outer Hebrides shaped the course of this struggle. For instance, throughout the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries a range of different regional players from across this wider ‘Irish Sea world’ became drawn into pulled into this conflict, each possessing a vested interest in the outcome of the Uí Néill successional war. By drawing upon a rich corpus of primary sources, including Irish, Scottish and English material, this article locates the Uí Néill feud within a wider dynastic and geopolitical context. Ultimately, the article argues for the necessity of exploring this feud from within a wider geographic and dynastic framework of interpretation, and paying closer attention to how events within the Irish Sea world could impact and impinge upon the politics of the wider archipelago.

George Leonard Staunton, who travelled on the first British embassy to China in 1793, and his son George Thomas Staunton, who translated the Chinese legal code into English, are well-known figures in the history of China. Their British identity was constructed by George Thomas to conceal the family's Irish Catholic background, but in fact George Leonard used that background for the benefit of an imperial career that propelled him from Galway to the West Indies, India and, finally, China. It enabled him to win the support of the papacy for the British embassy to China, and his son to learn Chinese and make a career as a merchant and translator. Their story shows some of the mechanisms that connected the nineteenth-century British Empire in Asia to the Catholic Church which had been the great global institution of the early modern age. Moreover, a distinctively Irish concern with property law can be seen to have influenced George Thomas's great work on Chinese law. The Stauntons’ imperial careers made the family wealthy and much of this wealth came back to County Galway.

Achmet Borumborad's arrival in Ireland in the 1760s, during which he claimed to be a Turk fleeing political persecution in Istanbul, quickly propelled him to prominence, making him one of the country's most distinguished figures. His published works and the establishment of a Turkish bath in Dublin, supported by the Irish parliament, solidified his reputation. However, Achmet's good fortune proved short-lived upon the discovery that he was, in fact, an Irishman. Consequently, he retreated from the public eye, and his life story has become one of the most widely known tales of corruption that contributed to the dissolution of the Irish parliament. This paper explores the extraordinary account of Achmet through previously unused documents, offering not only fascinating insights into social life in eighteenth-century Ireland but also intriguing revelations regarding perceptions of the Ottoman Empire and ‘Turkish fashion’ during this era.

From 1873 to 1876, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an African-American choral troupe from Nashville, Tennessee visited Ireland three times. This article details their experiences and impressions of the country, focusing especially on the relationship they forged with their Irish evangelical sponsors and audiences. While the Jubilee Singers’ story is typically told as an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity, this article argues that there is another way of framing the narrative that emphasises the centrality of evangelical Protestantism to the Jubilee Singers’ mission. The Irish tours brought this dimension into full relief, demonstrating how evangelicalism fostered a degree of mutual understanding between the singers and Irish Protestants while also serving to exclude Irish Catholics. This article also examines audience responses to the Jubilee Singers, particularly the racial and aesthetic concepts they used to describe them. For all that the singers were familiar on account of their faith, they were unfamiliar on account of their race; this tension structured not only Irish responses to the singers, but also the singers’ responses to Ireland.

This article examines Catholic architecture in Ireland prior to the passage of An act for the relief of His Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects (10 Geo IV, c. 7), popularly known as the Act of Emancipation, in 1829. It focuses on one case study building — the chapel, now church, of St John the Baptist in Cashel, County Tipperary. Bringing together a range of documentary and visual sources, this building is analysed according to its site, its specific architectural stylistic features, and in relation to the social and liturgical contexts for its development. The article contributes to the ongoing reassessment of the impact of the penal laws and the varied experiences of Catholics through the late eighteenth-century period of relief and reform, through its spatial, formal and contextual close reading of one hitherto overlooked building. In doing so, it deepens understanding of how architecture was used as a statement of civic identity and political intention by Catholics of status and means. It also contributes to contemporary understandings of regional classicism and to the specific meaning of ecclesiastical architectural style in late-eighteenth-century Ireland across denominations. Finally, this article considers the treatment and ‘strategic forgetting’ of this period of pre-1829 Catholic building activity during the era of grand architectural expansion at the end of the nineteenth century.

This article discusses political ‘moderates’, those individuals who reacted to the turmoil of the War of Independence by coalescing around a vision of a dominion of Ireland within the British Empire, with appropriate safeguards for minorities. It will consider how reformist gentry, parliamentary and former unionist elements came together to bring about their preferred settlement. Through statistical examination of the membership of the Irish Dominion League, the leading moderate movement, it will establish the political backgrounds, religion and social class of supporters, and demonstrate the various means by which moderates worked as intermediaries between British forces and the rebels. Southern unionists made efforts to avoid working with moderates and to retain a distinct political identity, and, ultimately, divisions within the movement, and the changing structure of Irish politics, inhibited the creation of an effective moderate party.

This article explores the Irish-American press’s engagement with the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany and the Paris Commune. The leading papers — the Irish-American, the Irish Citizen, The Pilot and the Irish World — commented extensively on the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath, and made use of widespread Irish-American sympathy for France in an attempt to influence the evolution of Irish-American ethnic immigrant identity after the American Civil War. The article assesses Irish-American editors’ opinions on the French and Prussian causes, and explores the parallels drawn with the Irish national cause. It then considers the Irish-American press's coverage of the American Republican party's pro-German stance after September 1870, which the editors assessed against the context of Reconstruction after 1865 and the attempts by Radical Republicans to achieve multi-racial citizenship in the United States. Finally, it explores Irish-American commentaries on the Paris Commune and the divisions between the editors that this international phenomenon fostered. It contributes to the study of the Irish-American experience of Reconstruction and the history of American engagement with international conflict after 1865.

In January 1922, Jessie Mackay represented the Self-Determination for Ireland League of New Zealand (S.D.I.L.N.Z.) at the Irish Race Congress in Paris. Irish people around the world were invited to attend this grand ‘family reunion’, where delegates discussed ways to assist the Irish revival, created an international organisation to connect members of the Irish ‘race’ and enjoyed exhibitions of Irish art, drama, music and dancing. Among those who assembled in Paris were delegates from Australasia who represented the S.D.I.L.N.Z. and the Self-Determination for Ireland League of Australia. These Australasian delegates played a pivotal role in keeping the congress on course. This article interweaves the history of the S.D.I.L.N.Z. with biographical details of Mackay's life in 1921 and 1922. Drawing on new archival research and material from New Zealand newspapers and periodicals, it adds to previous treatments of the congress by offering a distinct Australasian point of view. It investigates the S.D.I.L.N.Z. and why Mackay was chosen to represent it, how she contributed to the congress and what she made of proceedings.

This article examines Irish nationalist girl scouts in the period 1911‒23 with a particular focus on the organisation Clan na Gael (or Clann na nGaedheal). It illuminates the involvement of girls in Irish nationalist youth organisations in the early twentieth century and situates them in the wider contexts of uniformed youth groups and the Irish nationalist movement during this period. Like their male counterparts in Na Fianna Éireann, Irish nationalist girl scouts received forms of military training and provided military support services to their adult colleagues in the Irish independence movement. Thus, these Irish girls challenged the gender conventions of the time more overtly than members of the international Girl Guide movement. Participation in these groups could also serve as a conduit to future membership and activism in Cumann na mBan or the Irish Citizen Army. The contributions of Clan na Gael and other girl scouts to the Irish nationalist movement demonstrate that girls, as well as boys, sought to further the struggle for Irish independence. Yet, these adolescent female activists have received far less recognition for their efforts. This may be due to their relatively small numbers, dismissive preconceptions of their contribution, and the sparsity of primary source material.

This paper considers the interconnected practices of state formation, diplomacy, national identity and sport through an examination of ‘Irish’ involvement in the British Empire Games of 1930, 1934 and 1938. These events had a contradictory role in bolstering diplomatic relations between those who were committed to the empire but also in expressing the aspirations of those who sought independence from it, or a distinct identity within it. State formation and diplomacy played out in sporting contexts — which we term sportcraft — and this process was especially complex in post-partition Ireland. In the period under examination, a gradual but significant hardening of ideologies and identities occurred in certain sports on the island, notably athletics, mirroring the effects of partition and reflecting British and unionist political actions and sportive interests. Original archival and documentary material is presented from state archives in Dublin, London, Belfast and Ottawa, and from official sports collections in Birmingham, London, Stirling, Melbourne (Australia), Hamilton (Canada) and Lausanne (Switzerland). This demonstrates that by the early 1920s, government officials and sports administrators had already recognised the propaganda functions and utility of sport for state formation purposes and for issues of political control, jurisdiction and territorial boundaries.

By examining how Irish racial attitudes intersected with national and cultural identity, this article dismantles the idea that conceptions of race and racism are somehow peripheral or irrelevant to the nation's social history. Outlining a series of racialised incidents perpetrated against overseas students in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, it explains how attitudes to newcomers and ethnic ‘others’ can shed new light on post-independence national identity. By highlighting these distinctive aspects of national discourse, this article begins incorporating Irish understandings of race and diversity into the overwhelmingly white field of Irish history. It also adds an Irish perspective to a growing body of literature on race in predominantly white societies and challenges scholars to consider how conceptions of history, culture and identity fostered social inclusion and exclusion and conditioned attitudes to national and ethnic outsiders.

This article explores the Department of Education's programme of co-operation and rationalisation within the Irish post-primary school sector during the period 1966–70. Through a systematic analysis of government files and private convent archival collections, especially those of the Presentation Sisters, combined with oral history interviews, this study provides a unique insight into how co-operation and rationalisation in the post-primary sector were reconciled at ground level. It exposes the previously hidden history of voluntary secondary school authorities and the role they played in educational reform during the 1960s and explores how individual school authorities received, responded to and reacted to this new government initiative. To a large extent, the success of co-operation and rationalisation depended on the willingness of school authorities to accept and comply with departmental directives. This study, thus, expands understandings of the history of the Irish education system in general and of the reform period (c.1957‒72) in particular.

It was not common for members of religious orders in the late middle ages to make a last will and testament because profession as a regular removed their testamentary capacity. This article prints the Latin text of the testament of Brother Diarmaid Ó Conchobhair, prior of Cloontuskert na Sinna, O.S.A., County Roscommon, drawn up in 1462 and proved a year later in London, along with a translation. It also offers a discussion of the testament, including Ó Conchobhair's stated intention of going on pilgrimage to Rome, in the light of other evidence relating to both its testator and to the monastic orders in general in late medieval Ireland and England.

Even under sakoku (policy of national self-isolation), Japan observed the outside world. The result of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 was to create or reinforce close engagement with the world by writers, artists, officials and diplomats alike. While the first foreign language of most Japanese was to be English, some were more conversant with French or Italian (and in many cases, as late as the 1930s, with German). There has also been a handful variously able to read, write or speak a minoritised language like Irish; or an immensely challenging language like Finnish.

‘Nations,’ political geographer Jim MacLaughlin tells us, ‘literally have to be built from the ground up.’ During the Irish Revolution, republicans engaged in the construction of a counter-state which included the sporadic application of alternative policing arrangements and a judiciary in the form of Dáil courts, as well as a representative assembly that was driven underground for much of the War of Independence. However, several recent and highly original works of scholarship underline once again that the revolutionary period was as much about destroying British state apparatus and perceived symbols of colonialism as it was about creating a new nation-state. This thread of destruction has been explored from a micro-level (the burning of a village) to a national level (the burning of roughly 300 country houses). Justin Dolan Stover's highly anticipated Enduring ruin examines environmental destruction between 1916 and 1923 utilising a broad definition of environment that incorporates man-made structures, and their destruction, alongside rural landscapes. Stover's palpable rendering of the Easter Rising, for example, contends that ‘artillery bombardment, machine-gun fire, ensuing fires, looting, the collapse of asbestos-lined tenements, human and animal casualties, and odours indicative of unattended death grounded the rebellion's ruinous scope’ (p. 8). Enduring ruin innovatively elucidates the impact of this unique ‘sensory stamp’ on combatants and civilians while chronicling how propagandists utilised the imagery and language of the Great War to cultivate a sense of victimhood and elicit international sympathy (pp 12–13, 112–18). Other chapters examine the impact of less overtly political environmental damage and the impact of reprisals by crown forces. Like Donlon and Dooley's monographs, Stover tactfully considers the interaction between landscape and people throughout, drawing attention to the important area of the revolutionary period's impact on the mental health of combatants and civilians (pp 74, 92–7). This work adds a highly original perspective by presenting the impact of tree felling, road trenching and incendiarism, contrasting the ‘romanticism’ of sawing trees ‘by hand under the cover of darkness’ with ‘the disillusionment of the mechanised evisceration of nature experienced along the Western Front’ (p. 61). Alongside using weather reports to illustrate how ‘extreme weather did not stymy guerrilla activity’, the author also employs a sample of 2,183 incidents of ‘landscape manipulation and ensuing damage to the built and natural environment’ which, like the burning of big houses, correlates to the more violent areas of the country (pp 70–73).