History

  • A Crack in the Cosmos

    Some time around the year 466 BCE – in the second year  of the 78th Olympiad, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder tells us – a massive meteor blazed across the sky in broad daylight, crashing to the earth with an enormous explosion near the small Greek town of Aegospotami, or ‘Goat Rivers’, on the…

  • A Long Way to Peace

    Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Volume XIV, 1969-1973, eds Michael Kennedy, Eunan O’Halpin, Kate O’Malley, Bernadette Whelan, Kevin O’Sullivan, Jennifer Redmond, John Gibney and Melissa Baird, Royal Irish Academy, 1,122 pp, €50, ISBN: 978-1802050219 In one way it was the best of times: the last document in this fourteenth volume of Documents on Irish Foreign…

  • G’wan the Normies!

    Here’s a question. If the Normans, with whom it is has been claimed all our troubles began, were playing Transnistria, or some other faraway land, should we be up for the Normans? Well no, of course not! But hold on … maybe we should. After all, there are Norman surnames all around us. Aengus Ó…

  • Helping Spain

    ‘But to me our real shame lies in our silence regarding Fascism. We must be anti Fascist or all our history is a lie.’ Thus wrote poet Ewart Milne to Muriel MacSwiney on May 19th, 1942, at a stage in World War Two when it was by no means certain that the forces of fascism…

  • Looking for an Enemy

    Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation, Zuleika Rodgers and Natalie Wynn (eds), Peter Lang, 298 pp, €49.40, ISBN: 978-1800790834 The publication of this volume could hardly have come at a worse time for its reception by a world outraged by the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government on innocent Palestinian civilians,…

  • The Evaporation of Hatred

    In May 1909, Leonard Dunning, the head constable of Liverpool, wrote to the Home Office in London to warn that some very serious disturbances were looming in the city. Dunning had previously spent thirteen years in the Royal Irish Constabulary and, as he reminded Whitehall, ‘had a good deal of experience of troubles between Orangemen…

  • Power and the Polis

    In much of the ancient world a city’s emblem was its walls. ‘O Ur-shanabi,’ proclaims the hero in the last lines of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, ‘climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!’ Realising he cannot escape death, Gilgamesh takes comfort knowing the city walls of Uruk will be his legacy. The Old…

  • Written on Water

    In a moving obituary in New Left Review, the great sociologist Stuart Hall noted Raphael Samuel’s talent for ‘quarrying’ lives and historical themes. Inadvertently or not, in employing this verb – it recurs three times in the relatively short text – Hall evokes one of his friend, comrade and colleague’s short studies, ‘Headington Quarry: Recording…

  • The Gunman’s Shadow

      On January 7th, 1922, at the end of thirteen days of extraordinary debate about whether to endorse the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Dáil Éireann voted sixty-four to fifty-seven to do so. Éamon de Valera, president of the Irish Republic, who had led the arguments against it, said: I would like my last word here to be…