Detailed legal and court records of household and personal violence do not survive from early modern Ireland in sufficient numbers to allow for statistical analysis. However, close reading of selected court narratives about violence between householders allows analysis of the contested contemporary meanings of violence. In their descriptions, witnesses read the marks on injured bodies and interpreted their meanings according to gendered hierarchies of power within households. This article uses such narratives to analyse interpersonal violence between members of families and households in early modern Ireland.

The topic of urban revolt in medieval Ireland has been overlooked by wider scholarship. This article offers the first detailed analysis of a revolt which occurred in Galway in the late fourteenth century. The basis of this study is a twentieth-century transcription made of an extract from a plea roll of the king’s bench in Ireland before the latter’s destruction in 1922, which records the judicial proceedings taken against one of the town’s rebels and provides an under-exploited (and not entirely reliable) narrative of the key facts of this rebellion. This article locates the actions of Galway townspeople within a wider European pattern of protest and rebellion in the second half of the fourteenth century and, more specifically, places the revolt in the context of contemporary political events in Ireland and England. The events in Galway should be viewed as a genuinely ‘popular’ revolt, challenging assumptions about the presumed loyalty of towns and cities in medieval Ireland to the English crown and its local representatives.

This article examines the Dublin House of Industry in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Established in 1773, the House of Industry was part of an effort to launch a nationwide system of workhouses and something like a poor law system for Ireland. By the 1790s however, there was a shift from the paternalistic governance of the founders of the house to a new way of managing the relief of the poor within the institution. During this decade, there emerged a new board of governors who adopted a supposed ‘scientific’ approach to philanthropy. Influenced by the ideas of such workhouse reformers as Count Rumford in Munich, the new governors attempted to enact a sweeping series of changes to transform life in the workhouse along ‘oeconomical’ lines. It argues that these transformations reflected broader patterns of social change in the capital, as well as shifts in attitudes to poor relief more generally.

Historians continue to debate what form colonial rule took in early modern Ireland. This article explores how the reception and resistance to anglicisation, located in the everyday body language of submission and subordination encoded in gesture, might be understood in the experience of colonial rule. Exploring the gestural code operating in early modern Ireland, this article examines the role of body politics in the reception of and reaction to English rule. English ‘manners and apparel’ were central to the project of anglicisation. The body played a central role in representing and articulating social hierarchies in the early modern world. Body language offered a troubling everyday reminder of the inequalities signalled in the — non-reciprocal or non-reciprocated — gestures expected of ‘subordinates’ towards ‘superiors’. If the enforcement of the gestural order was important to the establishment of English rule, this also made gesture a focus for resistance and opposition. A body politics that exploited a shared understanding of the meaning of particular gestures could be drawn on in both everyday politics and collective protests to subvert, resist and retaliate against the political agenda of anglicisation. Looking forward to the eighteenth century and beyond state action, the article calls for more work on gesture.

Beginning in the late 1820s, gymnastics for adults and children became a noted phenomenon within some Irish cities. Predominantly led by foreign gymnastic instructors, the gymnastics wave marked a specific movement of transnationalism within Irish health and education. This article considers Dublin-based gymnastic instructors and physicians, weaving together histories of medicine, gender and transnationalism. Irish children’s bodies became a site of intense focus in the early nineteenth century, and medical and health tracts concerning children’s gymnastics reveal broader fears around the impact of modernity, the deficiencies of education and the socialisation of young people. Increasingly, children’s exercise became viewed as being of utmost importance to both the development of the individual and, more importantly, to the vitality of the nation itself. This contributes significantly to the historiography of Irish childhood by focusing not just on discourses, but on the bodies they sought to mould.

An examination of the history of menageries in Ireland from 1790 to 1840 offers insights into how people related to and understood the animal world through exhibitions of exotic creatures. Menageries, featuring diverse collections of wild animals displayed in cages, were part of the broader entertainment scene at fairs and large social events in the early nineteenth century. Journeying across Ireland and Britain in horse-drawn caravans, these exhibitions evolved from modest attractions to significant commercial enterprises by the mid nineteenth century. While British menageries of the period have received considerable scholarly attention, Irish menageries have been largely overlooked. This article seeks to address that gap by exploring how the Irish public encountered exotic and rare animals in menageries during this period. Newspapers, advertisements for travelling menageries and contemporary accounts reveal that menageries played a meaningful role in bringing the wonders of the animal kingdom to the Irish populace, offering a glimpse into the exotic and the unknown.

The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of nationalism as the primary ideological underpinning of Australian identity, defining the broader Australian people as a culturally British, Protestant community. Such developments drew strength from key events of the early twentieth century, such as Australian federation and the Great War. Although historians have conceded that Irish Australians could adhere to the cultural tenets of Anglo-Australia, they have overlooked the extent to which Irish-Australian Catholics, especially those from the middle class, adopted Britishness as an integral part of their ethno-religious identity. Middle-class Catholic individuals, families and groups negotiated the extent of their Irishness to suit their needs within economic, social and cultural spaces dominated by Australia’s Protestant majority. This article argues that the expression of Britishness was an intrinsic part of Catholics’ middle-class ambitions, as they sought to rectify their implicit ‘otherness’ in an Australia committed to a myth of national unity on non-Irish, and non-Catholic, terms.

This article examines the structure and role of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) in rural Ulster in 1922. It is argued the actions of the USC during this period have not received sufficient academic or public attention. The origins and organisational structure of the Specials are considered and it is claimed that the force’s decentralised make-up made it almost impossible to control. In terms of personnel, access to newly released archives gives unique insight into the force. Traditional assumptions about the connection between the pre-war Ulster Volunteer Force and the USC are questioned. Furthermore, it is found that few ‘B’ Specials had prior service with the British army. Overall, it is concluded that the Specials were an almost exclusively Protestant force made up of inexperienced and at times ill-disciplined recruits, most of whom were ill-suited to any policing role. Furthermore, it is argued that the Specials played a significant role in shaping post-partition identities in Northern Ireland.

The article charts the changing fortunes of the Catholics of Lisburn, County Antrim from 1914–22. It begins by exploring the establishment of a local battalion of the Irish National Volunteers and analysing Catholic recruitment to the war effort, before turning to the Easter Rising (1916), its aftermath and the bitter sectarian riots of August 1920, following the assassination of RIC District Inspector Swanzy. This murder in the centre of Lisburn led to days of violence and forced many of the town’s Catholics to flee. This paper argues that relations between nationalists and unionists in the 1914–22 period should be understood in the context of unionist beliefs regarding their communal safety and that territorial security is key to understanding the presence and form of violence in the town during the Swanzy Riots. Finally, some consideration is given to how this case study of Lisburn offers insight into understanding communal violence elsewhere in Ireland, during the wartime and revolutionary period.

The Irish language summer college is a unique institution that has provided education as Gaeilge to multiple generations for 120 years. Despite this enduring presence in Irish cultural memory, a presence which predates partition and the founding of the Irish Free State, the historical significance of this institution has been largely overlooked by scholars thus far. Initially founded for training teachers in the Irish language in 1904, the Irish colleges were born of the greater cultural revival movement spearheaded by the Gaelic League at the turn of the twentieth century. Scholars who have discussed the Irish colleges thus far, then, tend to treat them as offshoots of the League, a limiting view which overlooks the fact that each college retained a varying degree of independence from other colleges and external bodies. Their independence is key to the discussion of the Irish colleges’ role during the revolutionary era. Starting with the establishment of the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and ending in 1921, this article explores the degree to which Irish colleges facilitated the work of advanced nationalist organisations during this period and the effect this had on the wider language movement, the colleges themselves and those who attended them.

It was by chance that John Morrogh (1849–1901) became an imperial player. Leaving Ireland as an almost penniless young man moulded by the Catholic nationalism of the Christian Brothers, he joined the early diamond rush to Kimberley, South Africa, and returned home twenty years later a director of Cecil Rhodes’s De Beers Consolidated Diamond Mines. He joined the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and his diamond fortune eased his path to a seat in the House of Commons. As the IPP fragmented, he took the side of the anti-Parnellite, Tim Healy, until he resigned his seat and returned to Cork where he became an influential figure in business and local government. This article traces the fortunes and sensibilities of an Irish migrant who in many ways exemplifies Ireland’s ‘ambivalent heritage’ of nationalism and empire.1

An I.R.B. supreme council member and the I.R.A. 2nd Northern Division commandant, Charlie Daly was executed at Drumboe on 14 March 1923. Daly’s case shows how, through I.R.B. auspices, Free State G.H.Q. planned a joint northern offensive with republicans to avert civil war, while deploying the resources of the new state (and false promises) to engineer the support or at least neutrality of the Northern I.R.A. Eoin O’Duffy and Richard Mulcahy connived to remove Daly from his command because of his opposition to the Treaty, with events coming to a head at the ‘Beggar’s Bush inquiry’ on 2 March 1922. In due course, the Free State elite killed every senior republican brother party to the northern intrigue, including Joe McKelvey and Daly, the latter of whom was shot alongside Seán Larkin from Derry — a witness to GHQ ‘crookedness’ the previous March.

Ireland’s historical coordinates are shifting, prompting a re-examination of national narratives and of the assumptions and anxieties that have kept them in place. Increasingly, stories that disturb rather than coalesce with grand narratives are the focus of historical study, revealing the structural violence used to maintain societal order. This article argues that tending to bigger questions about power and smaller ones about human experience creates space for new and diverse histories. It explores the dynamics that shaped the grand narratives central to Irish history and proposes the idea of imagined and lived encounters as a way of thinking about differentiation, the relational nature of power and its impact on experience and everyday life. An analysis of the concept of respectability is used to probe how power functions. The article concludes with a consideration of the historical archive broadly defined, highlighting the benefits of embracing the ‘unreliable’ witness, listening and accounting for silences, touching the material, and considering imagination as a force constantly at play in the encounters that shape history. The acceptance of this dynamic instability in historical research creates possibilities for new voices and perspectives to emerge.

This article examines Conor Cruise O’Brien’s ideas about historical objectivity and the craft of the historian. Drawing on a mix of published material and unpublished manuscript sources, it charts the evolution of the thinking of a key Irish public intellectual about how historians should write history and how their work should relate to their contemporary world. It identifies several unacknowledged intellectual debts O’Brien owed to influential twentieth-century thinkers — namely, the philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the sociologist C. Wright Mills. The article challenges the claim that O’Brien’s view of historiography underwent significant changes in response to the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s. On the contrary, it is argued that O’Brien’s thinking on these themes remained fundamentally unchanged from the mid 1950s until the end of his long career as a public intellectual.

The contemporary LGBTQ+ history of Northern Ireland has emerged relatively recently. This article examines two negative models that fed into understandings of male homosexuality between the early 1960s and the end of the 1980s, and some of the discourses that emanated from them. Using contemporary comment, theological and medical writings, and oral history testimonies, this article charts the fortunes of models of ‘sickness’ and ‘sinfulness’. A campaign to secure law reform in the 1970s forced churches to confront the ‘problem’ of homosexuality. I demonstrate the complexity of responses from two major Protestant churches, the tentative emergence of a challenge from radical Christians and how this landscape has been obscured by the notoriety of an infamous fundamentalist campaign. As was the case in England, the notion of homosexuality as a pathology gained traction in Northern Ireland only in the 1950s and 1960s, leading to medical conversion practices, such as aversion therapy, which attempted to ‘cure’ men of same-sex desire. However, discourses conflicted, with regional social conditions resulting in ‘sickness’ co-existing uneasily with ‘sin’. And although it was opposed by a strain of evangelical thought, social conditions fostered by conservative religiosity enabled pathologisation to linger on through the 1980s.