Representing Belfast's Pasts

Representing Belfast's Pasts
Author: Raymond Gillespie
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-08-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9781846828683

From port to commercial centre, and from textile town to centre of shipbuilding, Belfast has adapted, chameleon-like, to changing circumstances. Each of these changes has resulted in a reimagination of the city's past to make it useable for the present. That has taken many forms. As the town grew in the nineteenth century, local historians, most particularly George Benn, provided Belfast with a narrative that charted and explained its past and charted the topographical development from small village to international industrial city. Benn and his fellow antiquarians were not alone. Others joined in the quest for a useable past for this emerging city. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries novelists, artists, travellers, photographers, Irish-language enthusiasts and memoir writers all created their own images of Belfast's past. These essays reveal the works they created in an effort to explain their own worlds to contemporaries through the medium of the past.

Belfast punk and the Troubles: An oral history

Belfast punk and the Troubles: An oral history
Author: Fearghus Roulston
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2022-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526152223

Belfast punk and the Troubles is an oral history of the punk scene in Belfast from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s. The book explores what it was like to be a punk in a city shaped by the violence of the Troubles, and how this differed from being a punk elsewhere. It also asks what it means to have been a punk – how punk unravels as a thread throughout the lives of the people interviewed, and what that unravelling means in the context of post-peace-process Northern Ireland. In doing so, it suggests a critical understanding of sectarianism, subjectivity and memory politics in the North, and argues for the importance of placing punk within the segregated structures of everyday life described by the interviewees. Adopting an innovative oral history approach drawing on the work of Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli, the book analyses a small number of oral history interviews with participants in granular detail. Outlining the historical context and the cultural memory of punk, the central chapters each delve into one or two interviews to draw out the affective, imaginative and political ways in which punks and former punks evoke their memories of taking part in the scene. Through this method, it analyses the punk scene as a structure of feeling shaped through the experience of growing up in wartime Belfast. Belfast punk and the Troubles is an intervention in Northern Irish historiography stressing the importance of history from below, and will be compelling reading for historians of Ireland and of punk, as well as those interested in innovative approaches to oral history.

Echoes of Authenticity in the Voices of Belfast

Echoes of Authenticity in the Voices of Belfast
Author: Barbara Gabriella Renzi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2023-12-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1527547507

This book dives deep into the heart of Belfast, a city of contrasts and resilience. In this exploration, tales of real experiences and threads of imagination are woven together. From Angela’s struggles in a city where faces like hers are rare, to Amina’s hope for her children’s future and the Chinese family confronting prejudice, each story paints a vivid portrait of life in this ever-evolving city. The book takes a journey through encounters with love, conflict, acceptance, and the relentless spirit of the people who call Belfast home. Whether you’re a local seeking to understand your city’s layered tapestry or a newcomer eager to grasp Belfast’s essence, this book offers a poignant, honest gaze into its soul.

Crime and Punishment in Nineteenth-century Belfast

Crime and Punishment in Nineteenth-century Belfast
Author: Jonathan Jeffrey Wright
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Crime
ISBN: 9781846828560

During the first half of the nineteenth century, thousands of Irish men and women were transported as convicts to Britain's penal colonies in Australia. Few, however, possessed back stories as intriguing as that of the Belfast-man John Linn. Sentenced to a term of seven years' transportation in 1838, Linn was an infamous figure. A parricide, he had violently killed his father in August 1832, but was judged to have been insane and placed in the Belfast Lunatic Asylum, from where he escaped in November 1835. Recaptured the following year, Linn was then placed in Carrickfergus Gaol, where he was discovered to be at the head of an escape conspiracy among the inmates and was convicted of 'administering unlawful oaths.' A microhistory of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century Belfast, this study reconstructs Linn's story in detail and places him in his contexts, shedding light on the society he inhabited, the institutions tasked with managing him, and the ways in which his story was remembered and retold in the years following his departure from Ireland.

Representing Agency in Popular Culture

Representing Agency in Popular Culture
Author: Ingrid E. Castro
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2018-12-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498574955

Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In-Between addresses the intersection of children’s and youth’s agency and popular culture. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children’s lives, this book places popular culture and representation as central to this endeavor. Core themes of family, gender, temporality, politics, education, technology, disability, conflict, identity, ethnicity, and friendship traverse across the chapters, framed through various film, television, literature, and virtual media sources. Here, childhood is considered far from homogeneous and the dominance of neoliberal models of agency is questioned by intersectional and intergenerational analyses. This book posits there is vast power in popular culture representations of children’s agency, and interrogation of these themes through interdisciplinary lenses is vital to furthering knowledge and understanding about children’s lives and within childhood studies.

Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors

Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors
Author: Chris Paton
Publisher: Pen and Sword Family History
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2023-05-04
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1526780348

Straddling parts of Counties Antrim and Down, the city of Belfast has seen its fair share of history across the centuries. From its humble beginnings as a ford based settlement between two tributaries of the River Lagan, it grew following its grant of a charter in 1613 to become a corporation town, and expanded dramatically when later made a city in 1888. Along the way it has experienced the darkest of times, including the Belfast Blitz and the recent Troubles, to some of the most enlightened developments across Ireland and the UK. In Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors, genealogist and best-selling author Chris Paton returns home to provide a research gateway for those wishing to trace their ancestors from the Northern Irish capital. With a concise summary of the city's history, a tour of some of the city's most amazing archives, libraries and museums, and a detailed overview of the records generated by those who came before, he expertly steers the reader towards centuries of ancestral exploration, both through online resources and within the city of Belfast itself – and with a wee bit of craic along the way!

Representing Irish Religious Histories

Representing Irish Religious Histories
Author: Jacqueline Hill
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2017-01-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 331941531X

This collection begins on the premise that, until recently, religion has been particularly influential in Ireland in forming a sense of identity, and in creating certain versions of reality. History has also been a key component in that process, and the historical evolution of Christianity has been appropriated by the main religious denominations – Catholic, Church of Ireland, and Presbyterian – with a view to reinforcing their own identities. This book explores the ways in which this occurred; the writing of religious history, and some of the manifestations of that process, forms key parts of the collection. Also included are chapters discussing current and recent attempts to examine the legacy of collective religious memory - notably in Northern Ireland - based on projects designed to encourage reflection about the religious past among both adults and school-children. Readers will find this collection particularly timely in view of the current ‘decade of commemorations’.