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Dublin has many histories: for a thousand years a modest urban settlement on the quiet waters of the Irish Sea, for the last four hundred it has experienced great - and often astonishing - change. Once a fulcrum of English power in Ireland, it was also the location for the 1916 insurrection that began the rapid imperial retreat. That moment provided Joyce with the setting for the greatest modernist novel of the age, Ulysses, capping a cultural heritage which became an economic resource for the brash 'Tiger Town' of the 1990s. David Dickson's magisterial survey of the city's history brings Dublin to life from its medieval incarnation through the glamorous eighteenth century, when it reigned as the 'Naples of the North', through to the millennium. He reassesses 120 years of Anglo-Irish Union, in which Dublin - while economic capital of Ireland - remained, as it does today, a place in which rival creeds and politics struggled for supremacy. Dublin reveals the rich and intriguing story behind the making of a capital city.
The Irish Celebrating is a collection of essays which focuses on the complex dynamics of celebrating, its significance and its scope, through Ireland’s past and present experience. This book studies the dual aspects of celebrating —‘the festive’ and ‘the tragic’— which, while not necessarily functioning as a binary opposition, have long proved mutually constitutive of the Irish experience. Many different occasions and ways of celebrating are explored, be they associated with feasts, festivals, commemorations, re-enactments or mere merry-making. Irish literature abounds with motifs, symbols, allusions and devices that stand as ample testimony to the essential part played by cele...
The first biography of the beloved long-time Lord Mayor of Dublin Alfie Byrne was that rarest of things: a genuinely popular politician. He is still a figure of legend in Dublin, where he was elected Lord Mayor ten times. He was also a TD and a Senator; and only a backroom deal prevented him from contesting the race to become the first President of Ireland - a race he would have been favourite to win. Rising from inner-city Dublin to become known as the 'Lord Mayor of Ireland', he was a truly remarkable figure. And yet there has never been a biography of Alfie Byrne - until now. Trevor White's sparkling book tells the story of a man of many parts and contradictions. He was an urbane man of t...
The first full-length study to explore the impact of the Great War on the lives of women in Ireland. Fionnuala Walsh examines women's mobilisation for the war effort, and the impact of the war on their employment opportunities, family and domestic life, social morality and politicisation.
County Louth and the Irish Revolution, 1912–1923 explores the local activism of the IRA and how revolution was experienced by rural and urban labourers, RIC men, republican women, cultural activists, and Big House families. Events were increasingly shaped for all these groups by the developing reality of partition, transforming a marginal county into a borderland and creating a zone of new violence and banditry. The expert contributors to the first-ever local history of the county during this period bring to light a wealth of fascinating stories that will appeal to the general public and historians alike. Critically, these stories reveal new findings about the early military skirmishes in County Louth by republican figures such as Seán MacEntee and Frank Aiken; the controversial sectarian massacre at Altnaveigh; and how the Civil War made a fiery battlefield of Dundalk and Drogheda. County Louth and the Irish Revolution, 1912–1923 documents the complexity of the local experience as the national revolution merged with long-established antagonisms and traditions, the effects of which have shaped the county ever since.
The long-awaited conclusion to Padraig Yeates's Dublin Trilogy, A City in Civil War tells the story of Dublin's troubled passage to independence amidst the acrimony and upheaval of the Civil War.
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