The forgotten ‘Fishery’ of Arklow

References to fishing grounds off Arklow can be found in Patrician legends and medieval documents. Over the centuries the activity and the area became synonymous, so that by the 1800s […]

‘Hottentot Venus’: the exhibition of Sara Baartman in Dublin in 1812

In a recent issue (HI 19.2, March/April 2011) Stephanie Rains wrote about the ‘native’ village exhibitions that Ireland both played host to and provided subject-matter for from the 1880s to […]

The Rothe collection: a legacy of the Counter-Reformation in Ireland

  The Rothe collection—on show in last year’s exhibition at Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery, ‘Portraits and People: Art in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’—contains five significant interrelated artefacts. It has intriguing portraits of […]

A single currency for the British Empire? A warning for the Euro

Examples of monetary union include those between the city states of ancient Greece, the attempts to coordinate the currencies of nineteenth-century German states and the Latin Monetary Union that existed in continental […]

‘What about Islandmagee?’ Another version of the 1641 rebellion

 The 1641 rebellion has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years thanks to the online release of the ‘1641 Depositions’, collected from Protestant survivors in the aftermath. But […]