The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of nationalism as the primary ideological underpinning of Australian identity, defining the broader Australian people as a culturally British, Protestant community. Such developments drew strength from key events of the early twentieth century, such as Australian federation and the Great War. Although historians have conceded that Irish Australians could adhere to the cultural tenets of Anglo-Australia, they have overlooked the extent to which Irish-Australian Catholics, especially those from the middle class, adopted Britishness as an integral part of their ethno-religious identity. Middle-class Catholic individuals, families and groups negotiated the extent of their Irishness to suit their needs within economic, social and cultural spaces dominated by Australia’s Protestant majority. This article argues that the expression of Britishness was an intrinsic part of Catholics’ middle-class ambitions, as they sought to rectify their implicit ‘otherness’ in an Australia committed to a myth of national unity on non-Irish, and non-Catholic, terms.

Beginning in the late 1820s, gymnastics for adults and children became a noted phenomenon within some Irish cities. Predominantly led by foreign gymnastic instructors, the gymnastics wave marked a specific movement of transnationalism within Irish health and education. This article considers Dublin-based gymnastic instructors and physicians, weaving together histories of medicine, gender and transnationalism. Irish children’s bodies became a site of intense focus in the early nineteenth century, and medical and health tracts concerning children’s gymnastics reveal broader fears around the impact of modernity, the deficiencies of education and the socialisation of young people. Increasingly, children’s exercise became viewed as being of utmost importance to both the development of the individual and, more importantly, to the vitality of the nation itself. This contributes significantly to the historiography of Irish childhood by focusing not just on discourses, but on the bodies they sought to mould.

Historians continue to debate what form colonial rule took in early modern Ireland. This article explores how the reception and resistance to anglicisation, located in the everyday body language of submission and subordination encoded in gesture, might be understood in the experience of colonial rule. Exploring the gestural code operating in early modern Ireland, this article examines the role of body politics in the reception of and reaction to English rule. English ‘manners and apparel’ were central to the project of anglicisation. The body played a central role in representing and articulating social hierarchies in the early modern world. Body language offered a troubling everyday reminder of the inequalities signalled in the — non-reciprocal or non-reciprocated — gestures expected of ‘subordinates’ towards ‘superiors’. If the enforcement of the gestural order was important to the establishment of English rule, this also made gesture a focus for resistance and opposition. A body politics that exploited a shared understanding of the meaning of particular gestures could be drawn on in both everyday politics and collective protests to subvert, resist and retaliate against the political agenda of anglicisation. Looking forward to the eighteenth century and beyond state action, the article calls for more work on gesture.

The contemporary LGBTQ+ history of Northern Ireland has emerged relatively recently. This article examines two negative models that fed into understandings of male homosexuality between the early 1960s and the end of the 1980s, and some of the discourses that emanated from them. Using contemporary comment, theological and medical writings, and oral history testimonies, this article charts the fortunes of models of ‘sickness’ and ‘sinfulness’. A campaign to secure law reform in the 1970s forced churches to confront the ‘problem’ of homosexuality. I demonstrate the complexity of responses from two major Protestant churches, the tentative emergence of a challenge from radical Christians and how this landscape has been obscured by the notoriety of an infamous fundamentalist campaign. As was the case in England, the notion of homosexuality as a pathology gained traction in Northern Ireland only in the 1950s and 1960s, leading to medical conversion practices, such as aversion therapy, which attempted to ‘cure’ men of same-sex desire. However, discourses conflicted, with regional social conditions resulting in ‘sickness’ co-existing uneasily with ‘sin’. And although it was opposed by a strain of evangelical thought, social conditions fostered by conservative religiosity enabled pathologisation to linger on through the 1980s.

An I.R.B. supreme council member and the I.R.A. 2nd Northern Division commandant, Charlie Daly was executed at Drumboe on 14 March 1923. Daly’s case shows how, through I.R.B. auspices, Free State G.H.Q. planned a joint northern offensive with republicans to avert civil war, while deploying the resources of the new state (and false promises) to engineer the support or at least neutrality of the Northern I.R.A. Eoin O’Duffy and Richard Mulcahy connived to remove Daly from his command because of his opposition to the Treaty, with events coming to a head at the ‘Beggar’s Bush inquiry’ on 2 March 1922. In due course, the Free State elite killed every senior republican brother party to the northern intrigue, including Joe McKelvey and Daly, the latter of whom was shot alongside Seán Larkin from Derry — a witness to GHQ ‘crookedness’ the previous March.

This article examines Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ideas about historical objectivity and the craft of the historian. Drawing on a mix of published material and unpublished manuscript sources, it charts the evolution of the thinking of a key Irish public intellectual about how historians should write history and how their work should relate to their contemporary world. It identifies several unacknowledged intellectual debts O’Brien owed to influential twentieth-century thinkers — namely, the philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the sociologist C. Wright Mills. The article challenges the claim that O’Brien’s view of historiography underwent significant changes in response to the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s. On the contrary, it is argued that O’Brien’s thinking on these themes remained fundamentally unchanged from the mid 1950s until the end of his long career as a public intellectual.

Detailed legal and court records of household and personal violence do not survive from early modern Ireland in sufficient numbers to allow for statistical analysis. However, close reading of selected court narratives about violence between householders allows analysis of the contested contemporary meanings of violence. In their descriptions, witnesses read the marks on injured bodies and interpreted their meanings according to gendered hierarchies of power within households. This article uses such narratives to analyse interpersonal violence between members of families and households in early modern Ireland.