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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

‘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).