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James M. Smith’s book, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (2007) fills a significant gap in research about the Magdalen laundries and their impact on Irish society. Frances Finnegan’s Do Penance or Perish (2001) has also tackled the subject, but her study is confined to the Good Shepherd asylums that operated in Ireland.
Once, radicals of the late 18th and early 19th century appeared as distinctly respectable. They were earnest, improving, and mindful of the public good, which was all of a piece with the sober Dissenting stock from which many of them sprang. There was, of course, a revolutionary fringe, but this was inhabited by the overwrought or the immature.
It would be easy, but facile, to dismiss emigration from Ireland to Argentina as a minor aberration in the history of both countries.
The 19th Century British Library Newspapers digital archive provides a full run of 48 British newspapers from the 19th century from 1800 to 1900.
It is said that ‘efficiency is doing better what is already being done’, although the word in English derives from the Latin efficere; simply, to accomplish. In its crudest sense then, regardless of culture or nationality, the vast majority of humanity engages in efficiency at a personal level on a daily basis.
Fergus Campbell’s book explores the relationship between agrarian conflict and nationalist politics in the period from 1891 to 1921. Although the study focuses primarily on the five counties of Connaught, with a particular emphasis on east Galway and especially the Craughwell area, provincial and local events are located in a national context.
As the question of taste increasingly preoccupies social historians, this forms an admirable contribution to a burgeoning set of historical works that explore why and how we alter what we eat and drink.
Beatrice Webb wrote in her first volume of autobiography, My Apprenticeship, that the age in which she grew up was dominated by two ‘idols of the mind’, namely a belief in scientific method and ‘the consciousness of a new motive; the transference of the emotion of self-sacrificing service from God to man’ (quoted p. 249). Auguste Comte was the prophet of both of these idols.
This is a fresh and perceptive work which seeks to examine the assumptions and methodology of Victorian and Edwardian poverty experts. Professor Martin reviews research undertaken by such familiar figures as T. R.
In Our Friend ‘The Enemy’ Thomas Weber attacks both the Sonderweg-interpretation of the German Kaiserreich and theories of British exceptionalism before 1914.