The Irish through British Eyes

The Irish through British Eyes
Author: Edward Lengel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2002-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 031301244X

The mainstream British attitude toward the Irish in the first half of the 1840s was based upon the belief in Irish improvability. Most educated British rejected any notion of Irish racial inferiority and insisted that under middle-class British tutelage the Irish would in time reach a standard of civilization approaching that of Britain. However, the potato famine of 1846-1852, which coincided with a number of external and domestic crises that appeared to threaten the stability of Great Britain, led a large portion of the British public to question the optimistic liberal attitude toward the Irish. Rhetoric concerning the relationship between the two peoples would change dramatically as a result. Prior to the famine, the perceived need to maintain the Anglo-Irish union, and the subservience of the Irish, was resolved by resort to a gendered rhetoric of marriage. Many British writers accordingly portrayed the union as a natural, necessary and complementary bond between male and female, maintaining the appearance if not the substance of a partnership of equals. With the coming of the famine, the unwillingness of the British government and public to make the sacrifices necessary, not only to feed the Irish but to regenerate their island, was justified by assertions of Irish irredeemability and racial inferiority. By the 1850s, Ireland increasingly appeared not as a member of the British family of nations in need of uplifting, but as a colony whose people were incompatible with the British and needed to be kept in place by force of arms.

Those Damned Rebels

Those Damned Rebels
Author: Michael Pearson
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1972
Genre: History
ISBN: 0306809834

A re-creation of the American Revolution from the British point of view --and a dramatically different picture of the birth of our nation.

The Victorian Eye

The Victorian Eye
Author: Chris Otter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2008-11-15
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0226640787

During the nineteenth century, Britain became the first gaslit society, with electric lighting arriving in 1878. At the same time, the British government significantly expanded its power to observe and monitor its subjects. How did such enormous changes in the way people saw and were seen affect Victorian culture? To answer that question, Chris Otter mounts an ambitious history of illumination and vision in Britain, drawing on extensive research into everything from the science of perception and lighting technologies to urban design and government administration. He explores how light facilitated such practices as safe transportation and private reading, as well as institutional efforts to collect knowledge. And he contends that, contrary to presumptions that illumination helped create a society controlled by intrusive surveillance, the new radiance often led to greater personal freedom and was integral to the development of modern liberal society. The Victorian Eye’s innovative interdisciplinary approach—and generous illustrations—will captivate a range of readers interested in the history of modern Britain, visual culture, technology, and urbanization.

Stakeknife

Stakeknife
Author: Greg Harkin
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2012-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847174388

BESTSELLER An explosive exposé of how British military intelligence really works, from the inside. The stories of two undercover agents -- Brian Nelson, who worked for the Force Research Unit (FRU), aiding loyalist terrorists and murderers in their bloody work; and the man known as Stakeknife, deputy head of the IRA's infamous 'Nutting Squad', the internal security force which tortured and killed suspected informers.

Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento

Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento
Author: N. Carter
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2015-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137297727

This book offers a unique and fascinating examination of British and Irish responses to Italian independence and unification in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapters explore the interplay of religion, politics, exile, feminism, colonialism and romanticism in fuelling impassioned debates on the 'Italian question' on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character
Author: William Williams
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2012-02-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299225232

Picturesque but poor, abject yet sublime in its Gothic melancholy, the Ireland perceived by British visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not fit their ideas of progress, propriety, and Protestantism. The rituals of Irish Catholicism, the lamentations of funeral wakes, the Irish language they could not comprehend, even the landscapes were all strange to tourists from England, Wales, and Scotland. Overlooking the acute despair in England’s own industrial cities, these travelers opined in their writings that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated moral failures of the Irish character.

The Road to Home Rule

The Road to Home Rule
Author: Paul A. Townend
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2016-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299310701

Shows that a rising antipathy in Ireland toward Victorian Britain's expanding global imperialism was a crucial factor in popular support for Irish Home Rule.

Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War

Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War
Author: J. B. E. Hittle
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2011
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1612341284

How the British Secret Service failed to neutralize Sinn Fein and the IRA

Say Nothing

Say Nothing
Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0307279286

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SOON TO BE AN FX LIMITED SERIES STREAMING ON HULU • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions. One of The New York Times’s 20 Best Books of the 21st Century "Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." —New York Times Book Review "Reads like a novel ... Keefe is ... a master of narrative nonfiction. . .An incredible story."—Rolling Stone A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, and more! Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

Irish Stereotype in American Cinema

Irish Stereotype in American Cinema
Author: Piotr Szczypa
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2021-08-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9004467971

From Levi and Cohen, Irish Comedians (1903) to The Irishman (2019), this book is a fascinating journey through the history of representations of the Irish in American cinema.