In The Current Issue
REGULARS
HISTORY IN THE NEWS:
The lasting legacy of the last viceroy
Seán Beattie
Waterways Ireland’s archive goes digital
Nuala Reilly
ON THIS DAY
Aodhán Crealey
BITE-SIZED HISTORY
Tony Canavan
Letters
Patrick Maume and revisionism
Civil War dismissed and downplayed
Platform
Kindness, cruelty and the Nine Years’ War
Éamonn Toland
GEMS OF ARCHITECTURE:
Barlow House, West Street, Drogheda, Co. Louth
Aisling Durkan
ARTEFACTS:
Armoured trucks in the Irish War of Independence
Lar Joye
KINDRED LINES:
Travel permits 1940–1952
Fiona Fitzsimons
LOCAL ARCHIVES:
A mid-eighteenth-century mystery rent-book
Patria McWalter
100 YEARS AGO:
Plenipotentiaries appointed
Joseph E. A. Connell Jr
Reviews
MUSEUM EYE:
Armagh County Museum
Tony Canavan
Bookworm
By Joe Culley
The Big Books
Bennett, Gillespie and Spurlock (eds), Cromwell and Ireland: new perspectives
By Micheál Ó Siochrú
Book Reviews
Maher (ed.), The Irish to the rescue: the tercentenary of the Polish Princess Clementina’s escape
By Tony Canavan
Leerssen (ed.), Parnell and his times
By Margaret O’Callaghan
Wheatley and Krobb (trans. & ed.), Ireland [1913] by Richard Arnold Bermann
By Róisín Healy
Deane, Small world: Ireland, 1798–2018
By Vona Groarke
Features
NAVAL:
Spanish Armada wrecks on the Irish coast
John Miles
FOLKLORE:
Swift Nix (Nicks)—an English highwayman and his Irish career
Amy L. Harris
MANUSCRIPTS:
The commissioning of Gordon O’Neill
Colum Kenny
AGRICULTURE:
Snapshot of a parish before the Famine
John Keating
MYTHOLOGY:
‘The first white man to visit America’—St Brendan in the nineteenth century
William Ward
CRIME:
The Canadian trial of the century—the story of ‘cracked Shortis’
Cian Manning
PANDEMIC:
Revisiting the demography of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Ireland
Chris Colvin and Eoin McLaughlin
EARLY LIFE:
Desmond Greaves’s formative years at the Birkenhead Institute, 1925–31
Michael Quinn
75TH ANNIVERSARY:
A brief history of the Irish Naval Service
Daire Brunicardi
PHILATELY:
The Northern Ireland ‘stamp war’, 1971–2
Matin Modarressi
Personal Histories
Editor’s Choice
On this Day
December 1
- 1919 Lady (Nancy) Astor became the first woman to take a seat in the Westminster House of Commons.
- 1956 Ronnie Delaney (21) won a gold medal for Ireland in the 1,500 metres at the Olympic Games in Melbourne, the first since Bob Tisdall in 1932.
- 1666 Sir James Ware (72), antiquary and historiographer, author notably of Ancient Irish histories (1633), died.
December 30
- 2006 Saddam Hussein was hanged in Baghdad, having been found guilty of crimes against humanity after a twelve-month trial.
- 1916 Grigori Rasputin (47), Russian peasant, faith healer and favourite of Czar Nicholas II and his family, was poisoned with wine and tea cakes, shot and drowned in the River Neva.
- 1691 Robert Boyle (64), chemist and religious philosopher, died. Born in Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford, the seventh son of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork (1566–1643), Boyle was packed off to Eton at the tender age of seven and thereafter travelled extensively on the Continent. In Florence he visited Galileo Galilei and was present when that great man passed away, an experience that may well have triggered his lifetime preoccupation with all matters scientific. Reared at a time when people still believed in magic and on an educational diet of an earth-centred universe, he was in every sense a pioneer, writing extensively in lucid prose on physics, medicine, philosophy and theology. Best remembered for Boyle’s Law, a gas law linking pressure and volume and a cornerstone of physics, he also predicted many of our modern ideas and inventions. His ‘prophetic wish list’ included ‘potent druggs [sic] to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory and other functions and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams etc.’—in other words, those sleeping tablets, artificial stimulants and antidepressants in your medicine cupboard. He might himself have benefited from some of the same. A committed celibate—his closest emotional support was his older sister, Katherine, with whom he lived in London over the last two decades of his life—he was a pious Anglican who would pause every time he mentioned the name of God. Contemporaries described him as a delicate, almost effeminate individual, ‘tall, slender and emaciated, brilliant in conversation, benevolent and tolerant but excessively abstemious and often oppressed with low spirits’. He died less than a week after his sister’s passing.
Above: Robert Boyle, chemist and religious philosopher.