My book Irish History Compressed (the new and updated second edition) will be available as part of the Smashwords 2022 End of Year Sale! This is a chance to get my book, along with books from many other great authors,…
Author: Bruce Gaston
Irish History Compressed e-book – second edition
A revised and slightly expanded version of my short history of Ireland should be available from all good e-book retailers by the time you read this. A couple of years ago, when the offer came to translate the original e-book…
Link
Cheering news for everyone interested in Ireland’s history: the mammoth project to recreate in virtual form the Public Records Office in Dublin’s Four Courts has been officially unveiled. (It can’t be said it’s been completed – indeed, it’s doubtful it ever can be.)
You can read about the destruction of the original archive here.
[Note: this post should have been published in May. For some reason it landed in the “drafts” folder instead.]
Eine komprimierte Geschichte Irlands:
Irish History Compressed in German
I’m delighted to say that the (still unpublished) second edition of Irish History Compressed has been translated into German. I decided that the first edition (which ended with the economic crash of 2008) needed updated to take into account the…
On this day: The Signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty
On this day, after over a month of arduous and sometimes ill-tempered negotiation, delegates representing Dáil Éireann, the break-away Irish parliament, signed an agreement with the British government that brought to an end the political violence that had wracked Ireland…
Sisi, Maynooth and St. George
This is actually from a call for papers for an academic conference on Austrian travel writing, but I found it pretty funny: On 24 February 1879, Empress Elizabeth of Austria (‘Sisi’), participating in a stag hunt out of Summerhill House,…
On this day: the Opening of the Northern Irish Parliament
One hundred years ago this week, on 22 June 1921, the official opening of a new parliament within the the United Kingdom took place. After elections on 24 May across the newly created entity of “Northern Ireland” (made up of…
Two Northern Irish book reviews:
Paramilitary Loyalism: Identity and Change/A Difficult Birth: The Early Years of Northern Ireland, 1920–5
Richard Reed, Paramilitary Loyalism: Identity and Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) Alan F. Parkinson, A Difficult Birth: The Early Years of Northern Ireland, 1920–5 (Dublin: Eastwood, 2020) As preparation for a guest lecture I gave at the University of…
A Short Biography of John Bulmer Hobson:
“The most dangerous man in Ireland”
John Bulmer Hobson was born on 14 January 1883 in Belfast and died on 8 August 1969 in Castleconnell, County Limerick. Unusually for an Irish revolutionary he actually came from a Protestant family. His family were Quakers, which is a…
Propaganda posters and postcards on Pinterest
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That’s a very alliterative title! I’ve been neglecting the Irish History Compressed Pinterest pages for quite a while now but just recently I’ve added some new pictures, all related to publicity campaigns/propaganda from the period of the Irish revolution. It’s meant to show many contrasting threads of opinion, so there are posters issued by Irish nationalists and Ulster Unionists, with a few others such as the ICA (who I hesitate to lump in with “Irish nationalists”, as their initial aims were quite different1). The one pictured here is interesting. I’ve never seen something like it before. I assume the rather odd promise not to conscript anyone into the Cumann na mBan sports days is simply a device to get a poster that prominently declares “NO CONSCRIPTION!” past the censor.
- As it happens, I’m reading The Irish Citizen Army by Ann Matthews (Mercier Press, 2014) at the minute. ↩