Australia's principal scholarly commemoration of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and its outcomes for both countries, represented in one volume by 32 selected papers from across the Humanities, arranged in five broad strands: 1798 and its remembrance; The Irish Diaspora; Northern Ireland; Literature and Culture; Twentieth Century Ireland.
Remembering the Year of the French is a model of historical achievement, moving deftly between the study of historical events—the failed French invasion of the West of Ireland in 1798—and folkloric representationsof those events. Delving into the folk history found in Ireland’s rich oral traditions, Guy Beiner reveals alternate visions of the Irish past and brings into focus the vernacular histories, folk commemorative practices, and negotiations of memory that have gone largely unnoticed by historians. Beiner analyzes hundreds of hitherto unstudied historical, literary, and ethnographic sources. Though his focus is on 1798, his work is also a comprehensive study of Irish folk history and grass-roots social memory in Ireland. Investigating how communities in the West of Ireland remembered, well into the mid-twentieth century, an episode in the late eighteenth century, this is a “history from below” that gives serious attention to the perspectives of those who have been previously ignored or discounted. Beiner brilliantly captures the stories, ceremonies, and other popular traditions through which local communities narrated, remembered, and commemorated the past. Demonstrating the unique value of folklore as a historical source, Remembering the Year of the French offers a fresh perspective on collective memory and modern Irish history. Winner, Wayland Hand Competition for outstanding publication in folklore and history, American Folklore Society Finalist, award for the best book published about or growing out of public history, National Council on Public History Winner, Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff Prize for the best study of folklore or folk life in Great Britain and Ireland “An important and beautifully produced work. Guy Beiner here shows himself to be a historian of unusual talent.”—Marianne Elliott, Times Literary Supplement “Thoroughly researched and scholarly. . . . Beiner’s work is full of empathy and sympathy for the human remains, memorials, and commemorations of past lives and the multiple ways in which they actually continue to live.”—Stiofán Ó Cadhla, Journal of British Studies “A major contribution to Irish historiography.”—Maureen Murphy, Irish Literary Supplement "A remarkable piece of scholarship . . . . Accessible, full of intriguing detail, and eminently teachable.”?—Ray Casman, New Hibernia Review “The most important monograph on Irish history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be published in recent years.”—Matthew Kelly, English Historical Review “A strikingly ambitious work . . . . Elegantly constructed, lucidly written and inspired, and displaying an inexhaustible capacity for research”—Ciarán Brady, History IRELAND “A closely argued, meticulously detailed and rich analysis . . . . providing such innovative treatment of a wide array of sources, his work will resonate with the concerns of many cultural and historical geographers working on social memory in quite different geographical settings and historical contexts.”—Yvonne Whelan, Journal of Historical Geography
Part one of a two-volume biography on Robert Emmet, one of the best known but least understood figures in Irish history. The author draws on significant new research to establish the correct relationship between the pivotal events of 1798 and 1803 in which Emmet played a significant role.
Travel writing has, for centuries, composed an essential historical record and wide-ranging literary form, reflecting the rich diversity of travel as a social and cultural practice, metaphorical process, and driver of globalization. This interdisciplinary volume brings together anthropologists, literary scholars, social historians, and other scholars to illuminate travel writing in all its forms. With studies ranging from colonial adventurism to the legacies of the Holocaust, The Long Journey offers a unique dual focus on experience and genre as it applies to three key realms: memory and trauma, confrontations with the Other, and the cultivation of cultural perspective.
The mingling of aristocrats and commoners in a southern French city, the jostling of foreigners in stock markets across northern and western Europe, the club gatherings in Paris and London of genteel naturalists busily distilling plants or making air pumps, the ritual fraternizing of "brothers" in privacy and even secrecy—Margaret Jacob invokes all these examples in Strangers Nowhere in the World to provide glimpses of the cosmopolitan ethos that gradually emerged over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jacob investigates what it was to be cosmopolitan in Europe during the early modern period. Then—as now—being cosmopolitan meant the ability to experience people of different nations, creeds, and colors with pleasure, curiosity, and interest. Yet such a definition did not come about automatically, nor could it always be practiced easily by those who embraced its principles. Cosmopolites had to strike a delicate balance between the transgressive and the subversive, the radical and the dangerous, the open-minded and the libertine. Jacob traces the history of this precarious balancing act to illustrate how ideals about cosmopolitanism were eventually transformed into lived experiences and practices. From the representatives of the Inquisition who found the mixing of Catholics and Protestants and other types of "border crossing" disruptive to their authority, to the struggles within urbane masonic lodges to open membership to Jews, Jacob also charts the moments when the cosmopolitan impulse faltered. Jacob pays particular attention to the impact of science and merchant life on the emergence of the cosmopolitan ideal. In the decades after 1650, modern scientific practices coalesced and science became an open enterprise. Experiments were witnessed in social settings of natural inquiry, congenial for the inculcation of cosmopolitan mores. Similarly, the public venues of the stock exchanges brought strangers and foreigners together in ways encouraging them to be cosmopolites. The amount of international and global commerce increased greatly after 1700, and luxury tastes developed that valorized foreign patterns and designs. Drawing upon sources as various as Inquisition records and spy reports, minutes of scientific societies and the writings of political revolutionaries, Strangers Nowhere in the World reveals a moment in European history when an ideal of cultural openness came to seem strong enough to counter centuries of chauvinism and xenophobia. Perhaps at no time since, Jacob cautions, has that cosmopolitan ideal seemed more fragile and elusive than it is today.
In the century between the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish Civil War, more than seven million Irish men and women left their homeland to begin new lives abroad. While the majority settled in the United States, Irish emigrants dispersed across the globe, many of them finding their way to another “New World,” Australia. Ireland’s New Worlds is the first book to compare Irish immigrants in the United States and Australia. In a profound challenge to the national histories that frame most accounts of the Irish diaspora, Malcolm Campbell highlights the ways that economic, social, and cultural conditions shaped distinct experiences for Irish immigrants in each country, and sometimes in different parts of the same country. From differences in the level of hostility that Irish immigrants faced to the contrasting economies of the United States and Australia, Campbell finds that there was much more to the experiences of Irish immigrants than their essential “Irishness.” America’s Irish, for example, were primarily drawn into the population of unskilled laborers congregating in cities, while Australia’s Irish, like their fellow colonialists, were more likely to engage in farming. Campbell shows how local conditions intersected with immigrants’ Irish backgrounds and traditions to create surprisingly varied experiences in Ireland’s new worlds. Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association “Well conceived and thoroughly researched . . . . This clearly written, thought-provoking work fulfills the considerable ambitions of comparative migration studies.”—Choice
This book is the first sustained attempt to incorporate critical scholarship and thought at the cutting edge of contemporary geography, history and archaeology into the burgeoning field of Irish heritage studies. It seeks to illustrate the validity of multiple depictions of the Irish past, showing how scrutiny of heritage practices and meanings is so essential for illuminating our understanding of the present. Examining Ireland's heritages from a critical perspective that celebrates notions of heterogeneity and uniqueness, the distinguished contributors to this book scrutinise the multiplicity of complex relations between heritage, history, memory, commemoration, economy, and cultural identity within various historical, geographical and archaeological contexts. Using several examples and case studies, this book raises issues not only from a uniquely Irish perspective, but also investigates the memorialisation and marketing of the Irish past in overseas locations such as the USA and Australia.
The founding of the Catholic missions in Australia coincided with the defining drift of power and prestige within the nineteenth-century Church. This was a period of chronic dissension among Australia's Catholic communities, powerfully drawn by the ultramontane impulse and political manoeuvring to refer their problems to the Pope. Roman bureaucratic control, exercised through the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide, was the single most important factor in the resolution of these problems and, consequently, in the determinative shaping of the colonial Australian Church. Based on extensive archival research, this study explores issues of process, politics and personality in the formulation of papal policy towards a part of the world that could not be more distant from Rome.
Over the past thirty years the Australian travel experience has been ‘Aboriginalized’. Aboriginality has been appropriated to furnish the Australian nation with a unique and identifiable tourist brand. This is deeply ironic given the realities of life for many Aboriginal people in Australian society. On the one hand, Aboriginality in the form of artworks, literature, performances, landscapes, sport, and famous individuals is celebrated for the way it blends exoticism, mysticism, multiculturalism, nationalism, and reconciliation. On the other hand, in the media, cinema, and travel writing, Aboriginality in the form of the lived experiences of Aboriginal people has been exploited in the service of moral panic, patronized in the name of white benevolence, or simply ignored. For many travel writers, this irony - the clash between different regimes of valuing Aboriginality - is one of the great challenges to travelling in Australia. Travel Writing from Black Australia examines the ambivalence of contemporary travelers’ engagements with Aboriginality. Concentrating on a period marked by the rise of discourses on Aboriginality championing indigenous empowerment, self-determination, and reconciliation, the author analyses how travel to Black Australia has become, for many travelers, a means of discovering ‘new’—and potentially transformative—styles of interracial engagement.