A special issue of the annual Field Day Review dedicated to the City of Derry and environs in celebration of Derry City of Culture UK 2013.

This is a wide-ranging analysis of the internal dynamics of Irish republicanism between the outbreak of ‘the Troubles’ in 1969 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Engaging a vast array of hitherto unused primary sources alongside original and re-used oral history interviews, ‘The Age-Old Struggle’ draws upon the words and writings of more than 250 Irish republicans. This book scrutinises the movement's historical and contemporary complexity, the variety of influences within Irish republicanism, and divergent republican responses at pivotal moments in the conflict. Yet it also assesses the centripetal forces which connected republican organisations through decades of struggle. Across five thematic chapters, ‘The Age-Old Struggle’ offers new insights into republicanism’s multi-layered interactions with the global ’68, tactical and strategic change, revolutionary socialism, feminism, and religion. Drawing on political periodicals, ephemera, and interviews with activists throughout the ranks of several republican groups, the book roots its analysis in republicanism’s temporal and spatial complexity. It contends that the cultural significance of place, interactions with class and revolutionary politics, and shifting intra-movement networks are essential to understanding the movement’s dynamics since 1969.

Tells the absorbing story of post-famine Donegal, the Molly Maguires - a secret society who had set themselves up against the exploitation of the rural poor - and Patrick McGlynn - an avaricious schoolmaster who turned informer on them, availing of hunger, disease, debt, hardship, and death to expand his holding at the expense of his neighbours.

The captivating story of two British brothers whose attempts to reform an empire helped to incite rebellion and revolution in America and insurgency and reform in Ireland Patrick Griffin chronicles the attempts of brothers Charles and George Townshend to control the forces of history in the heady days after Britain's mythic victory over France in the mid-eighteenth century, and the historic and unintended consequences of their efforts. As British chancellor of the exchequer in 1767, Charles Townshend instituted fiscal policy that served as a catalyst for American rebellion against the Crown, while his brother George's actions at the same moment as lord lieutenant of Ireland politicized the kingdom, leading to Irish legislative independence. This fascinating study is the first to consider as a linked history the influence of two all-but-forgotten brothers, both of whom rose to national prominence in the same year. Griffin vividly reconstructs the many worlds the Townshends moved through and explores how their shared conception of an empire that could harness the wealth of America to the manpower of Ireland initiated an age of revolution.

During the twentieth century, men and women across Ireland picked up cameras, photographing days out at the beach, composing views of Ireland's cities and countryside, and recording political events as they witnessed them. Indeed, while foreign photographers often still focused on the image of Ireland as bucolic rural landscape, Irish photographers-snapshotter and professional alike-were creating and curating photographs which revealed more complex and diverse images of Ireland. Snapshot Stories explores these stories. Erika Hanna examines a diverse array of photographic sources, including family photograph albums, studio portraits, the work of photography clubs and community photography initiatives, alongside the output of those who took their cameras into the streets to record violence and poverty. The volume shows how Irish men and women used photography in order to explore their sense of self and society and examines how we can use these images to fill in the details of Ireland's social history. By exploring this rich array of sources, Snapshot Stories asks what it means to see-to look, to gaze, to glance-in modern Ireland, and explores how conflicts regarding vision and visuality have repeatedly been at the centre of Irish life.

A historian's personal journey into the complex questions of immigration, home and nation From Ireland to London in the 1950s, Derry in the Troubles to contemporary, de-industrialised Manchester, Joyce finds the ties of place, family and the past are difficult to break. Why do certain places continue to haunt us? What does it mean to be British after the suffering of Empire and of war? How do we make our home in a hypermobile world without remembering our pasts? Patrick Joyce's parents moved from Ireland in the 1930s and made their home in west London. But they never really left the homeland. And so as he grew up among the streets of Paddington and Notting Hill and when he visited his family in Ireland he felt a tension between the notions of home, nation and belonging. Going to My Father's House charts the historian's attempt to make sense of these ties and to see how they manifest in a globalised world. He explores the places - the house, the street, the walls and the graves - that formed his own identity. He ask what place the ideas of history, heritage and nostalgia have in creating a sense of our selves. He concludes with a plea for a history that holds the past to account but also allows for dynamic, inclusive change.

"Ireland's revolution was an inherently transnational event. Buoyed by the rise of Wilsonian self-determination and the consequent weakening of imperial prestige, radical and anti-colonial movements flourished across the globe after the First World War. Although emerging from widely differing contexts, from Korea to India, and Egypt to Ireland, proponents of these movements communicated, engaged with, and learned from one another in anti-imperial metropoles such as Paris, London and New York. Irish nationalists at home and abroad were intimately involved in this international exchange, from mobilizing Ireland's vast diaspora in support of Irish independence, or engaging directly with radical causes elsewhere in the world, to providing models for other anti-colonial struggles. Reassessing the Irish Revolution within this transnational context, this volume broadens our understanding of Ireland's place in the evolving postwar world. Foregrounding how the ebbing of political authority from the imperial to democratic nation-state created revolutionary opportunities that were seized by anti-colonial activists, this study argues for the importance of empire, anti-imperialism and new understandings of self-determination in shaping political discourse and violence in revolutionary Ireland"--

Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama shows how the leading Irish playwright explores a series of dynamic physical and intellectual environments, charting the impact of modernity on rural culture and on the imagined communities he strove to create between readers, and script, actors and audience.

This book explores the life and career of Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1826–1902). Dufferin was a landowner in Ulster, an urbane diplomat, literary sensation, courtier, politician, colonial governor, collector, son, husband and father. The book draws on episodes from Dufferin’s career to link the landowning and aristocratic culture he was born into with his experience of governing across the British Empire, in Canada, Egypt, Syria and India. This book argues that there was a defined conception of aristocratic governance and purpose that infused the political and imperial world, and was based on two elements: the inheritance and management of a landed estate, and a well-defined sense of ‘rule by the best’. It identifies a particular kind of atmosphere of empire and aristocracy, one that was riven with tensions and angst, as those who saw themselves as the hereditary leaders of Britain and Ireland were challenged by a rising democracy and, in Ireland, by a powerful new definition of what Irishness was. It offers a new perspective on both empire and aristocracy in the nineteenth century, and will appeal to a broad scholarly audience and the wider public.

This book looks at Irish Gothic and horror texts, in both English and Irish, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Each selected work is considered in its historical context, to illustrate the historiographical role of horror and monstrosity in Irish fiction.