Fighting for Lincoln? Irish attitudes to slavery during the American Civil War

The correlation between the growth of the Southern cotton industry in the nineteenth century and the slave population is unmistakable: in 1790 Southern plantations produced only 70,000 bales of raw […]

The harp that once on Ireland’s coins

It is supposed that Pope Leo X gave a harp or cláirseach to Henry VIII at the same period as Fidei Defensor during that honeyed pre-Reformation period. The symbol was […]

Seduced by sociability, cards and port wine: the misspent youth of William Smith O’Brien

A year after the failure of his July 1848 rebellion in Tipperary, William Smith O’Brien found himself in a small cottage, isolated from other convicts, on Maria Island, Van Diemen’s […]

The Old Countess, the Geraldine knight and the lady antiquarian: a conspiracy theory revisited

In the nineteenth century, Katherine Fitzgerald, the ‘Old’ Countess of Desmond, was one of the most familiar characters from early modern Ireland. Her story was romantic and remarkable. Assumed to […]

Iona, the Vikings and the making of the Book of Kells

Despite more than a century of scholarly research, we know remarkably little about the circumstances in which the Book of Kells was made. While it is now clear that at […]