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The literature surrounding British attitudes toward the American Civil War has a long history extending almost back to the conflict itself, in part because it speaks to a question that has long intrigued academic and popular readers alike; namely, how might the outcome of the conflict been different if the British government had extended diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy or even interve

Arguably, no other institution in the Middle Ages and early modern era was as subject to as many legal disparities and disputes between royal and papal power as that of royal marriage. In fact, a royal marriage was far from a private affair. On the spiritual level, the marriage of a royal couple was to reflect the sanctity of the life union between woman and man at the highest strata.

Terence Brown’s history of the Irish Times is one of a number of similar texts published recently which indicates an upsurge of interest in the Irish media landscape – Kevin Rafter’s Irish Journalism Before Independence (1), Ann Andrews’ Newspapers and Newsmakers (2) and Mark O’Brien and Felix Larkin’s edited collect

Benedict Anderson’s conceptualisation of nations as ‘invented communities’ identified the emergence of modern nationalism through a combination of demotic print culture and the growth of capitalism.

President Obama’s recent visit to Ireland inspired a new wave of interest in the international experiences of formerly enslaved African American Frederick Douglass. He travelled to Britain in 1845 and spent the first few months of his trip gaining support from Irish audiences in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Belfast, to name a few of the cities he visited.

For all historians of this last, most violent, century some concern with matters of war and peace has been unavoidable.

In 1966 the historical profession was deprived of a talented and original practitioner, when Dr Walter Love was killed in a traffic accident. Utah-born Love was drawn towards Irish history following his postgraduate research into Edmund Burke, and ultimately his interest centred on how the events of 1641 had become engrained into collective memory in Ireland.

Few cultural commentators would feel brave enough to identify a particular month and year when human character underwent a significant transformation- the novelist Virginia Woolf had no such reservations. According to her, December 1910 marked one of these distinctive turning points.

This is a useful contribution to the growing body of research on 19th-century Irish print media (it begins with a survey of academic literature on the subject).