Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race

Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race
Author: Bruce Nelson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2013-12-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691161968

This is a book about Irish nationalism and how Irish nationalists developed their own conception of the Irish race. Bruce Nelson begins with an exploration of the discourse of race--from the nineteenth--century belief that "race is everything" to the more recent argument that there are no races. He focuses on how English observers constructed the "native" and Catholic Irish as uncivilized and savage, and on the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, where Irish immigrants were often portrayed in terms that had been applied mainly to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Most of the book focuses on how the Irish created their own identity--in the context of slavery and abolition, empire, and revolution. Since the Irish were a dispersed people, this process unfolded not only in Ireland, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. Many nationalists were determined to repudiate anything that could interfere with the goal of building a united movement aimed at achieving full independence for Ireland. But others, including men and women who are at the heart of this study, believed that the Irish struggle must create a more inclusive sense of Irish nationhood and stand for freedom everywhere. Nelson pays close attention to this argument within Irish nationalism, and to the ways it resonated with nationalists worldwide, from India to the Caribbean.

Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany

Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany
Author: Shane Nagle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1474263763

Focusing on the era in which the modern idea of nationalism emerged as a way of establishing the preferred political, cultural, and social order for society, this book demonstrates that across different European societies the most important constituent of nationalism has been a specific understanding of the nation's historical past. Analysing Ireland and Germany, two largely unconnected societies in which the past was peculiarly contemporary in politics and where the meaning of the nation was highly contested, this volume examines how narratives of origins, religion, territory and race produced by historians who were central figures in the cultural and intellectual histories of both countries interacted; it also explores the similarities and differences between the interactions in these societies. Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany investigates whether we can speak of a particular common form of nationalism in Europe. The book draws attention to cultural and intellectual links between the Irish and the Germans during this period, and what this meant for how people in either society understood their national identity in a pivotal time for the development of the historical discipline in Europe. Contributing to a growing body of research on the 'transnationality' of nationalism, this new study of a hitherto-unexplored area will be of interest to historians of modern Germany and Ireland, comparative and transnational historians, and students and scholars of nationalism, as well as those interested in the relationship between biography and writing history.

A History of Irish Modernism

A History of Irish Modernism
Author: Gregory Castle
Publisher:
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107176727

This book attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well as artistic concerns.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland
Author: Marc Mulholland
Publisher:
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198825005

Since the plantation of Ulster in the 17th century, Northern Irish people have been engaged in conflict - Catholic against Protestant, Republican against Unionist. This text explores the pivotal moments in this history.

John Mitchel

John Mitchel
Author: Bryan P. McGovern
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1572336544

"This is an informative, balanced biography that embraces a man who seemed defined by contradictions. McGovern unravels these to reveal how Mitchel made sense of himself and his world. The result is a must-read book for anyone interested in nineteenth-century Irish and American history." --Susannah U. Bruce, author of The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865 This book chronicles the life and times of John Mitchel, a radical Irish nationalist who relocated to the American South, where he became an ardent supporter of the Confederacy before and during the Civil War. Mitchel was exiled for his beliefs by the British government in 1848, during the Great Famine (1845-52). Though neither a peasant nor a Catholic, he empathized with the plight of over one million impoverished Irish Catholic emigrants who fled starvation. These expatriates believed that they had been forced unwillingly from their homes by the British government, which they also blamed for causing the famine or at least creating conditions that seriously threatened Irish survival. As a publisher of several expatriate newspapers, Mitchel was able to echo the sentiments of his audience, and perhaps more important, shape the prevailing attitudes of Irish Americans attempting to adjust to a hostile society. Well educated, bourgeois, and respected by the Irish immigrant community, the Protestant Mitchel became an ardent Irish nationalist during a time when most Irish Protestants, including the "Scotch-Irish" in America, were becoming almost uniformly opposed to Irish nationalism. In giving full treatment to his experience in America, this first contemporary biography of Mitchel addresses the basic paradox of his ideology: why an Irish nationalist who called for an end to the British "enslavement" of the Irish enthusiastically supported the slave society of the American South. It thus sheds invaluable light on how Irish nationalism played out on both sides of the Atlantic and on issues of racism and cultural assimilation facing the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. Bryan McGovern is an assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State University. He published an essay on Mitchel in New Hibernia Review.

Reimagining The Nation-State

Reimagining The Nation-State
Author: Jim Mac Laughlin
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2001-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN:

This book assesses competing modes of nation-building and nationalism through a critical reappraisal of the works of key theorists such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. Exploring the processes of nation building from a variety of ethnic and social class contexts, it focuses on the contested terrains within which nationalist ideologies are often rooted. Mac Laughlin offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of nation building, taking as a case study the historical connections between Ireland and Great Britain in the clash between 'big nation' historic British nationalism on the one hand, and minority Irish nationalism on the other. Locating the origins of the historic nation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mac Laughlin emphasises the difficulties, and specifities, of minority nationalisms in the nineteenth century. In so doing he calls for a place-centred approach which recognises the symbolic and socio-economic significance of territory to the different scales of nation-building. Exploring the evolution of Irish Nationalism, Reimaging the Nation State also shows how minority nations can challenge the hegemony of dominant states and threaten the territorial integrity of historic nations.

Newspapers and Newsmakers

Newspapers and Newsmakers
Author: Ann Andrews
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1781381429

In an era of mass mobilisation, the Great Famine and rebellion, this book shows how the writers of the mid-19th century Dublin nationalist press were at the heart of Irish nationalist activities, and evaluates the consequences for the development of Irish nationalism.

Irish Nationalists in America

Irish Nationalists in America
Author: David Brundage
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2016-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199715823

In this important work of deep learning and insight, David Brundage gives us the first full-scale history of Irish nationalists in the United States. Beginning with the brief exile of Theobald Wolfe Tone, founder of Irish republican nationalism, in Philadelphia on the eve of the bloody 1798 Irish rebellion, and concluding with the role of Bill Clinton's White House in the historic 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, Brundage tells a story of more than two hundred years of Irish American (and American) activism in the cause of Ireland. The book, though, is far more than a narrative history of the movement. Brundage effectively weaves into his account a number of the analytical themes and perspectives that have transformed the study of nationalism over the last two decades. The most important of these perspectives is the "imagined" or "invented" character of nationalism. A second theme is the relationship of nationalism to the waves of global migration from the early nineteenth century to the present and, more precisely, the relationship of nationalist politics to the phenomenon of political exile. Finally, the work is concerned with Irish American nationalists' larger social and political vision, which sometimes expanded to embrace causes such as the abolition of slavery, women's rights, or freedom for British colonial subjects in India and Africa, and at other times narrowed, avoiding or rejecting such "extraneous" concerns and connections. All of these themes are placed within a thoroughly transnational framework that is one of the book's most important contributions. Irish nationalism in America emerges from these pages as a movement of great resonance and power. This is a work that will transform our understanding of the experience of one of America's largest immigrant groups and of the phenomenon of diasporic or "long-distance" nationalism more generally.

The Irish Revolution

The Irish Revolution
Author: Patrick Mannion
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2024-12-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1479835250

How the Irish Revolution was shaped by international actors and events The Irish War of Independence is often understood as the culmination of centuries of political unrest between Ireland and the English. However, the conflict also has a vitally important yet vastly understudied international dimension. The Irish Revolution: A Global History reassesses the conflict as an inherently transnational event, examining how circumstances and individuals abroad shaped the course Ireland’s struggle for independence. Bringing together leading international scholars of modern Ireland, its diaspora, and the British Empire, this volume discusses the Irish revolution in a truly global sense. The text situates the conflict in the wider context of the international flourishing of anti-colonial movements following World War I. Despite the differences between these movements, their proponents communicated extensively with each other, learning from and engaging with other revolutionaries in anti-imperial metropoles such as Paris, London, and New York. The contributors to this volume argue that Irish nationalists at home and abroad were intimately involved in this exchange, from mobilizing Ireland’s vast diaspora in support of Irish independence to engaging directly with radical causes elsewhere. The Irish Revolution is a vital work for all those interested in Irish history, providing a new understanding of Ireland’s place in the evolving postwar world.

Irish Nationalists in Boston

Irish Nationalists in Boston
Author: Damien Murray
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2018-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813230012

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the intersection of support for Irish freedom and the principles of Catholic social justice transformed Irish ethnicity in Boston. Prior to World War I, Boston’s middle-class Irish nationalist leaders sought a rapprochement with local Yankees. However, the combined impact of the Easter 1916 Rising and the postwar campaign to free Ireland from British rule drove a wedge between leaders of the city’s two main groups. Irish-American nationalists, emboldened by the visits of Irish leader Eamon de Valera, rejected both Yankees’ support of a postwar Anglo-American alliance and the latter groups’ portrayal of Irish nationalism as a form of Bolshevism. Instead, ably assisted by Catholic Church leaders such as Cardinal William O’Connell, Boston’s Irish nationalists portrayed an independent Ireland as the greatest bulwark against the spread of socialism. As the movement’s popularity spread locally, it attracted the support not only of Irish immigrants, but also that of native-born Americans of Irish descent, including businessman, left-leaning progressives, and veterans of the women’s suffrage movement. For a brief period after World War I, Irish-American nationalism in Boston became a vehicle for the promotion of wider democratic reform. Though the movement was unable to survive the disagreements surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, it had been a source of ethnic unity that enabled Boston’s Irish community to negotiate the challenges of the postwar years including the anti-socialist Red Scare and the divisions caused by the Boston Police Strike in the fall of 1919. Furthermore, Boston’s Irish nationalists drew heavily on Catholic Church teachings such that Irish ethnicity came to be more clearly identified with the advocacy of both cultural pluralism and the rights of immigrant and working families in Boston and America.