department of History
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Tomas Finn: Tuairim, Intellectual Debate and Policy Formation: Rethinking Ireland, 1965-75, (Manchester University Press, 2012) 

A new book examining the history of a "think tank", established in the mid 1950s, to challenge the ways Ireland was governed, socially, politically and economically, has been published by Manchester University Press. "Tuairim: intellectual debate and policy formulation: Rethinking Ireland, 1954-75", was written by Dr Tomas Finn, a lecturer in modern Irish History at NUI Galway.

Tuairim (the Irish word for "opinion") was an intellectual movement that challenged traditional orthodoxy and put forward new ideas and fresh solutions. From the 1950s, Tuairim's members, who included the late Garret Fitzgerald, future Supreme Court Judge Donal Barrington, Miriam Hederman O'Brien, Jim Doolan and David Thornley, sought to influence debate and public policy in an attempt to re-invent the country. This book argues that Tuairim influenced the key public policy decisions that shaped modern Ireland. Investment in education, reforms to censorship and the system of childcare, the central importance of economic plannint to Ireland's future and moves towards a more conciliatory policy in relation to Northern Ireland were policies on which Tuairim's members voiced influential arguments.

The book also considers Tuairim's contributions to debates on both administrative and Oireachtas reform and those on the quality of ideas informing public policy. The society's hopes for moves towards equality of opportunity, and increased co-operation, provoked a strong reaction from vested interests, particularly the Catholic Church , but also facilitated increased activity by the state. In assessing the relative successes and failures of the organisation in these areas, the book is an addition to the current public debate on national policy and its administration and Ireland's intellectual and cultural development in the post-Celtic Tiger period.

Link to Manchester University Press 

Gearóid Barry: The Disarmament of Hatred: Mark Sangnier, French Catholicism and the Legacy of the First World War, 1914-45, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Enrico Dal Lago: American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and beyond: The U.S. "Peculiar Institution" in International Perspective, Paradigm Publishers, 2012 

American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond provides an up-to-date summary of past and present views of American slavery in international perspective and suggests new directions for current and future comparative scholarship. It argues that we can better understand the nature and meaning of American slavery and antislavery if we place them clearly within a Euro-American context. Current scholarship on American slavery acknowledges the importance of the continental and Atlantic dimensions of the historical phenomenon, comparing it often with slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America. However, since the 1980s, a handful of studies has looked further and has compared American slavery with European forms of unfree and nominally free labor. Building on this innovative scholarship, this book treats the U.S. “peculiar institution” as part of both an Atlantic and a wider Euro-American world. It shows how the Euro-American context is no less crucial than the Atlantic one in understanding colonial slavery and the American Revolution in an age of global enlightenment, reformism, and revolutionary upheavals; the Cotton Kingdom’s heyday in a world of systems of unfree labor; and the making of radical Abolitionism and the occurrence of the American Civil War at a time when nationalist ideologies and nation-building movements were widespread.

Link to Paradigm Publishers

Daibhi Ó Cróinín & Immo Warntjes (eds): The Easter controversy of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the Science of Computus in Ireland and Europe, Galway, 18-20 July, 2008, Brepols, 2011

2010 saw the publication of the Proceedings of the 1^st International Conference on the Science of Computus in Ireland and Europe, which took place in Galway, 14–16 July, 2006. That first collection, which had the sub-title Computus and its Cultural Context in the Latin West, AD 300–1200, brought together papers by ten of the leading scholars in the field, on subjects ranging from the origins of the Annus Domini to the study of computus in Ireland c. 1100. All those who participated in the Conference were unanimous that a second, follow-up event should be organized, and that duly took place (also in Galway), 18–20 July, 2008. The proceedings of that Conference are published in this current volume. 

The topics covered in the 2^nd Galway Conference ranged from the general – but vitally important – vocabulary of computus (i.e., the technical terminology developed by computists to describe what they were doing) to the origins of the different systems used to calculate the date of Easter in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. In addition, there was discussion also of the great debates about Easter, epitomized by the famous Synod of Whitby in AD 664, and the role of well-known individuals in the evolution of computistical knowledge (e.g., Anatolius of Laodicea, the African Augustalis, Sulpicius Severus, Victorius of Aquitaine, Cassiodorus, Dionysius Exiguus, Willibrord, the ninth-century Irish scholar-exile, Dicuil, as well as the late-tenth century Abbo of Fleury).

Link to Brepols

Dáibhí Ó Cróinín: Whitley Stokes (1830-1909): The Lost Celtic Notebooks Rediscovered, Four Courts Press, 2010

 Whitley Stokes was described as 'the greatest of living Celtic philologists'.  the discovery, by Professor Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, NUI Galway, of all Stokes's 150 working Celtic notebooks, unnoticed since 1919 in the Universirty Library, Leipzig, has only now revealed the extent of Stokes's astonishing industry in his later years, and makes available the manuscript notebooks that Stokes used during a lifetime of research in Celtic studies.

Link to Four Courts Press.

Enrico Dal Lago: Comparative Slavery - chapter 30 in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, ed. Robert L. Paquette & Mark M. Smith, OUP 2010, pp 664-684

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas offers penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World. With essays on colonial and antebellum America, Brazil, the Caribbean, the Indies, and South America, the Handbook has impressive geographic and temporal coverage. It also includes a generous range of thematic essays on comparative slavery, the economics of slavery, historical methodology in the field, slavery and the law, for instance.

Link to Oxford University Press

Robert Portsmouth: John Wilson Croker - Irish Ideas and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, Irish Academic Press 2010

John Wison Croker, forgotten man of nineteenth-century politics and letters, is given new life here.  Drawing on previously unpublished Croker archives held in US universities, contemporary press and other sources, Robert Portsmouth provides a substantial re-interpretation of the life and times of Croker.

Link to Irish Academic Press

Mary N Harris (ed): Sights and Insights: Interactive Images of Europe and the Wider World, Edizionia Plus, Pisa University Press, 2007 

This is the second volume produced by the Thematic Work Group 6 of the pan-European Network of Excellence for interdisciplinary historical research, CLIOHRES.net.

Besides being the sole editor and co-writer of the introduction with Csaba Lévai, Dr Harris has an article, "Irish Images of Religious conflict in Mexico in the 1920s", in this volume

Mary N Harris and Csaba Lévai (eds): Europe and its Empires, Ediziona Plus, Pisa University Press, 2008

This is the second volume produced by the Thematic Work Group 6 of the pan-European Network of Excellence for interdisciplinary historical research, CLIOHRES.net.The volume looks at Europeans and non-Europeans as they acted and moved in empires; at how empires operated, how they were used, what kind of knowledge and information became available because of them, and what countervailing strategies they stimulated.

In addition to editing this volume, Dr Harris and Dr Lévai wrote the introduction.

Matjaz Klemencic and Mary N. Harris (eds): European Migrants, Diasporas and Indigenous Ethnic Minorities (Edizioni Plus, Pisa University Press, 2009

This is the fourth volume produced by the Thematic Work Group 6 of the pan-European Network of Excellence for interdisciplinary historical research, CLIOHRES.net.

This volume explores new dimensions and directions in the multiple links between European countries and the 'wider world'.

Communicating in Canada's Past evolved out of essays presented at the inaugural Conference on Media History in Canada of 2006, which brought together media historians from across the disciplines and from both French and English Canada. The first collection of its kind, this volume assembles both well-established and up-and-coming scholars to address sizable gaps in the literature on media history in Canada.

Communicating in Canada's Past includes a substantial introduction to media history as a field of study, historiographical essays by senior scholars Mary Vipond, Paul Rutherford, and Fernande Roy, and original research essays on a range of subjects, including print journalism, radio, television, and advertising. Editors Gene Allen and Daniel J. Robinson have provided a sophisticated, wide-ranging introduction for those who are new to media history while also assembling a valuable collection of new research and theory for those already familiar with the field.

John Cunningham: Unlikely Radicals: Irish Post-Primary Teachers and the ASTI 1909-2009 (Cork Univeristy Press, 2009)

In 2009, the ASTI celebrates the 100th Anniversary of its foundation. Founding members included such national figures as Eamon de Valera and Thomas MacDonagh, both of who served as second-level teachers. The ASTI has rich history in representing the teaching profession and in promoting second-level education and has been a dynamic force in the education sector in Ireland. The ASTI is the largest second-level teachers’ union in Ireland with 17,500 members teaching in over 75% of second-level schools.

Unlikely Radicals provides a social and historical account of the ASTI’s role in the development of second-level education and the teaching profession in Ireland. It demonstrates the remarkable contribution which second-level education has made to the lives of millions of young people and to social, political and economic progress in Ireland. It details the development of a trade union which has had a significant impact on social and education policy and which has continued to represent the values of Irish teachers and their aspirations for those they teach. 

More Information: Cork University Press

Alison Forrestal & Eric Nelson: Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009)

Containing ten essays representing the latest research by specialist scholars of the period,  this book explores the political and religious world that developed in France over the course of the thirty years betweeen 1594 and 1624.

More Information : http://www.palgrave.com/

Simon Potter, 'What did you do in the war, Professor? Imperial history and propaganda, 1939- 45' in Robert Blyth and Keith Jeffery (eds), The British empire and its contested pasts (Irish Historical Studies XXVI, Irish Academic Press, Dublin and Portland OR, 2009)

Imperial rule, commerce, culture and contestation of empire are all represented in this volume, with a particular (but by no means exclusive) focus on aspects and consequences of Britain's Asian empire, as well as reflections on Irish engagements with the British imperial phenomenon.  While indigenous peoples are explored, so too are cultural perceptions of empire by Britons, and Britain by the colonised who ventured to the imperial 'Mother Country'.  Unexpected corners of the imperial experience are covered, including Belfast-supported missionaries in Nigeria and French Canadian sympathizers for Irish nationalists. Affirmations of empire stand side by side with contestations in, for example, China, Ireland, Africa and Canada.

More details at http://www.iap.ie/

Slave Systems, Ancient and Modern edited by Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

This is a ground-breaking edited collection charting the rise and fall of forms of unfree labour in the ancient mediterranean and the modern Atlantic, employing the methodology of comparative history.  The eleven chapters in the book deal with conceptual issues and different approaches to historical comparison, and include specific case-studies ranging from the ancient forms of slavery of classical Greece and of the Roman Empire to the modern examples of slavery that characterized the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States.  The results demonstrate both how much the modern world has inherited from the ancient in regard to the ideology and practice of slavery, and also how many of the issues and problems related the the latter seem to have been fundamentally comparable across time and space.

More info from Cambridge University Press.

Caitriona Clear: Social Change and everyday life in Ireland, 1850-1922 (Manchester University Press, 2007)

Men and women who were born, grew up and died in Ireland between 1850 and 1922 made decisions – to train, to emigrate, to stay at home, to marry, to stay single, to stay at school -based on the knowledge and resources they had at the time. This, the first comprehensive social history of Ireland for the period 1850–1922 to appear since 1981, tries to understand that knowledge and to discuss those resources on the island, for men and women at all social levels, as a whole.

More information from Manchester University Press

Dáibhí Ó Cróinín: The Kings Depart: The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon Royal Exile in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries , Quiggin Pamphlets on the Sources of  Gaelic History No 8,(Dept of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge, 2007)

Based on a comprehensive re-evaluation of unpublished and published charters, letters, poems, and narrative sources, this is the first scholarly volume devoted to the life and political career of Adela, the youngest daughter of William the Conqueror (c.1067-1137), who ruled as countess of Blois, Chartres, and Meaux for over twenty years. Well-known to literary historians for generations, Adela, in this book, emerges as a powerful lord who ably used her status, literacy, wealth, familial and feudal networks, and comital powers to rank among the most important players on the French political scene in the first two decades of the twelfth century.
More information from Four Courts Press

In the late nineteenth century, during the period between the Great Famine and the Land War, the plight of poverty-stricken tenants was intensified by the tyranny of the landed class.  Depressed districts such as Erris, partry and Connemara were amongst the areas most affected.  In this absorbing book, Gerard Moran gives an objective account of the clash between the 'Patriot Priest  of Partry' - as he has been called by Cardinal O Fiach - and Baron Plunket of Tuam, a harsh landlord, condemned even by "The Times" of London.   Among the topics covered in this book, which will make for especially compelling reading for Mayo and Galway peoploe, are 'soupers', 'jumpers' and the workhouse; the Achill Mission; the National School system and the efforts of the Christian Brothers, the Third Order, etc; the Party Evictions; riots and court actions in Ballinrobe and elsewhere; the 'Castlebar Settlement' (another treaty of Limerick in its way); the stand of landowners like George Henry Moore on the one hand and Sir Richard O'Donel of Newport on the other; and the drift to Fenianism when non-violence appeared ineffective.  Fr. Lavelle was probably the most famous men ever born in the Westport area, and indeed one of Mayo's most noted sons, while the Partry Evictions, like the Maamtrasna Murders, have left the indelible mark on the folk memory of the west of Ireland.

More info from publisher Nonsuchireland

Between 1800 and 1914 over eight million people emigrated from Ireland. While the majority paid their own passage or had the fares paid by relations and friends in North America, there was a sizeable group who could not afford to leave. This book looks at the 300,000 emigrants who went to North America from nineteenth-century Ireland and who had their fares paid by the British government, landlords, poor law unions and philanthropists. Most of these emigrants were among the poorest people in Ireland: workhouse paupers, landless labourers, single women or those living in the congested board areas where they encountered perennial destitution and near famine conditions.

More information from http://www.fourcourtspress.ie/

Gerard Moran Sir Robert Gore Booth and His Landed Estate in County Sligo, 1814-1876: Land, famine, emigration and politics (Four Courts Press, 2006) .

More information from http://www.fourcourtspress.ie/

In this first volume of the Royal Irish Academy's multi-volume A New History of Ireland a wide range of scholars have produced studies of Ireland's archaeology, art, culture, geography, geology, history, language, law, literature, music, and related topics. Initial chapters examine geography and the physical environment, neolithic, bronze-age, and iron-age Ireland, and Ireland up to 800. Society, laws, church, and politics are all analysed separately as are architecture, literature, manuscripts, language, coins, and music. The volume is brought up to the twelfth century with chapters, amongst others, on the Vikings, Ireland and its neighbours, and opposition to the High-Kings...

More from Oxford University Press.

Agrarian Elites American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners by Enrico Dal Lago, (Louisiana State University Press Baton Rouge, 2005)

Between 1815 and 1861, American slaveholders and southern Italian landowners presided over the econimic and social life of two predominantly agricultural regions, the U.S. South and Italy's Mezzogiorno.  Agrarian Elites charts the parallel developments of plantatons and latifondi in relation to changes in the world economy.  At the same time, it examines the spread of "paternalistic" models of family relations and of slave and free-labor management that accompanied the rise of large groups of American slaveholders and southern Italian landed proprietors in the early-to-mid-1800s.

More Information from Louisianna State University Press

Threatened by the proliferation of cheap, mass-produced publications, the Religious Tract Society issued a series of publications on popular science during the 1840s. The books were intended to counter the developing notion that science and faith were mutually exclusive, and the Society's authors employed a full repertoire of evangelical techniques--low prices, simple language, carefully structured narratives--to convert their readers... 

More from University of Chicago Press...

Simon J. Potter, (ed.), Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: reporting the British Empire, c. 1857-1921 (Four Courts Press, 2004)

This collection of essays explores the varied attitudes towards empire once sustained by different groups in Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland, and by their diasporic descendants.  The collection also examines the images of the British Empire that were projected by newspapers and periodicals in Ireland and Britain.

More from Four Courts Press  here...

Roisin Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Brill, 2003)

From 1872 to 1917 legislation banned Jesuits from Imperial Germany. Believing the Jesuits sought to control the social, political, and religious realms, the Protestant bourgeoisie championed the ban and promoted a politics of paranoia against the Jesuits... The core of the book is evenly divided between an analysis of the political struggle over the passage, gradual dilution, and eventual repeal of the Jesuit Law and the main themes of anti-Jesuitism: the order's internationalism, moral theology, and scholarship...

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News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System 1876-1922 (2003), by Simon J. Potter 

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were increasingly drawn together by an imperial press system. This is the first scholarly study of the development of that system. Simon J. Potter examines key debates during episodes such as the South African War and the First World War, and reveals the ambiguous impact of the system on local, national, and imperial identities. 

More details from Oxford University Press...

Early Irish History and Chronology (2003), by Dáibhí Ó Cróinín

These essays bring together the fruits of twenty years' research into the concepts of time and time-reckoning that were formulated by Irish scholars in the centuries between the coming of Christianity and the age of Bede.

More details from Four Courts Press...

  The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno (2002), ed. by Enrico dal Lago and Rick Halpern

The essays gathered in this volume explore the prospects for comparison between the American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno - two regions with similarities in their processes of modernization, but also with striking social and cultural differences.

More details from Palgrave...

Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (2001), by Nicholas Canny

Winner of the NUI Irish Historical Research Prize, 2003.

This is the first comprehensive study of the settlements implanted in Ireland by English and Scottish people during the years 1580-1650. The arguments advanced by successive political figures in favour of a plantation policy are examined, as are the responses which this policy elicited from the several segments of the population of Ireland. Attention is also given to practical considerations that have had a bearing on colonization schemes...

More from Oxford University Press...

The picture often painted of Irish women who were not in the paid workforce in the first four decades of Irish independence was one of narrow, optionless lives, ceaseless drudgery, and severe subordination. This study blends official records and personal testimonies of all kinds from these years, to show us that this was not necessarily so.

More information from Irish Academic Press...

Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447-1603 (1998), by Steven Ellis

This book explores Ireland as a frontier society divided between the English and Gaelic worlds. Our understanding of both worlds, and their interaction (culminating in the Tudor conquest and the collapse of Gaelic rule) has been transformed over the past thirty years through the detailed research of Irish and Tudor specialists alike; and this wealth of new scholarship is fully synthesised in the text...

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