This book examines the impact of World War One on the people of Limerick. It traces how recruitment, which was weak at the commencement of the war, increased locally after the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond, issued his call for Irish nationalists and others to enlist, and, as the war progressed, how Sinn Féin separatists impinged on recruiting efforts. It also shows that the British War Office were unwitting contributors to the separatists’ cause by their ill-conceived actions that only assisted them in their political cause and anti-recruiting campaign. The book also tracks how the separatists gained considerably in both military and political strength locally through the inept policies that changed public support for the war effort, thereby paving the way for the Sinn Féin victory in the General Election of December 1918; thus giving credence to the author and poet Robert Graves’ description that Limerick had become a Sinn Féin-ridden town. Further to this, it demonstrates that, despite the best efforts of local capitalists to procure war work contracted out by the British War Office, only very little was achieved; the War Office ensuring that the vast array of such work was to remain in Britain. Some local capitalists did, of course, gain as a result of the war; these were notably those such as merchants and farmers who were in a position to provide Britain and her army with all the foodstuffs that she required. Those on low incomes, namely the working class who also provided the majority of recruits for the armed forces, were to suffer through the ever-increasing price rises. This book, therefore, reveals a complex scene where social and political alignments reflect much of what was happening nationally, but also had uniquely local characteristics.
The First World War required the mobilisation of entire societies, regardless of age or gender. The phrase 'home front' was itself a product of the war with parts of Britain literally a war front, coming under enemy attack from the sea and increasingly the air. However, the home front also conveyed the war's impact on almost every aspect of British life, economic, social and domestic. In the fullest account to-date, leading historians show how the war blurred the division between what was military and not, and how it made many conscious of their national identities for the first time. They reveal how its impact changed Britain for ever, transforming the monarchy, promoting systematic cabinet government, and prompting state intervention in a country which prided itself on its liberalism and its support for free trade. In many respects we still live with the consequences.
Around 250,000 Belgian refugees who fled the German invasion spent the First World War in Britain – the largest refugee presence Britain has ever witnessed. Welcomed in a wave of humanitarian sympathy for ‘Poor Little Belgium’, within a few months Belgian exiles were pushed off the front pages of newspapers by the news of direct British involvement in the war. Following rapid repatriation at British government expense in late 1918 and 1919 Belgian refugees were soon lost from public memory with few memorials or markers of their mass presence. Reactions to Belgian refugees discussed in this book include the mixed responses of local populations to the refugee presence, which ranged from extensive charitable efforts to public and trade union protests aimed at protecting local jobs and housing. This book also explores the roles of central and local government agencies which supported and employed Belgian refugees en masse yet also used them as a propaganda tool to publicise German outrages against civilians to encourage support for the Allied war effort. This book covers responses to Belgian refugees in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in a Home Front wartime episode which generated intense public interest and charitable and government action. This book was originally published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora.
Aristocrats and itinerants, unionists and nationalists, Catholics and Protestants – the Great War united thousands of Clare men and women to a cause for which many of them would go out to fight and die. Their motives varied from a sense of duty to 'king and country' to concern about the fate of 'poor Catholic Belgium'; from mercenary motives, fuelled by poverty, to the moral duty to fight for civilization against the 'savage Huns', or, like many young men, to the simple thirst for adventure. This seminal work attempts, for the first time, to understand what really happened in County Clare during the Great War, how its economic and political life was radically transformed during this terrible conflict, and how the contribution of those who gave their lives was largely written out of history.'
A collection of new research on neglected aspects of the 1916 Rising by the top 1916 scholars. The book examines the impact of the Rising within the United Kingdom, British Empire, North America, and Australasia, and provides a fresh context to the new work on key figures such as James Connolly and Padraig Pearse. Contents: Introduction --- Ruan O'Donnell - The Limerick Volunteers and 1916 --- John O'Callaghan - Vanguard of the Revolution? The Irish Citizen Army, 1916 --- Ann Matthews - 'A Land Beyond the Sea': Irish and Scottish Republicans in Dublin, 1916' --- Mairtin Sean O Cathain - The British Labour and Socialist Movement and the 1916 Rising --- David Granville - Antipodean Irish Catholic Responses to the 1916 Rising --- Rory Sweetman - 'The Wilson Administration and the 1916 Rising --- Bernadette Whelan - Journees Sanglantes/ Days of Blood: The French Press and the Easter Rising --- Ian McKeane - The Easter Rising and the First World War. A Contextual Study --- Priscilla Metscher and James Connolly - 'A People That Did Not Exist?: Reflections on Some Sources and Contexts for Patrick Pearse's Militant Nationalism --- Roisin Ni Ghairbhi - 1916: Insurrection or Rebellion? Making Judgements --- Peter Berresford Ellis - 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley': Reflections on the Writing of Irish History in the Period of the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence --- Brian P Murphy - Rethinking the Republic: The Republican Movement and 1966 --- Matt Treacy - Appendices: The 1916 Proclamation. Introduction to C. Desmond Greaves, 1916 as History, The Myth of Blood Sacrifice --- Anthony Coughlan - Nominal Roll of the Irish Citizen's Army.
The updated and expanded fourth edition of Diversity in America addresses key controversial topics generating debate in US society today. The book answers these and many other questions by using history and sociology to shed light on socially constructed myths. Vincent N. Parrillo takes the reader through different American eras, beginning with the indigenous populations and continuing through colonial times, the industrial age, the information age and today. The book uses intergenerational comparisons and extrapolation of present trends into future probabilities to offer the reader a holistic analytic commentary to provide additional helpful insights and understanding.
Focusing on Ireland's literary and artistic response to World War I, this book explores works from a range of perspectives that intervened in Irish political and cultural discourse. Works such as Patrick MacGill's novel The Amateur Army (1915), John Lavery's Daylight Raid from my Studio (1917) and Margaret Barrington's My Cousin Justin (1939) show how the war was fully examined by Irish authors--but was disregarded with the beginning of World War II. Diverse voices challenged prevailing notions of Irish national identity, from the bourgeois cosmopolitanism of Tom Kettle to the working-class internationalism of Patrick MacGill to Pamela Hinkson's cynicism about imperial patriarchy.
A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field and provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. Covers the culture, politics, and environment of the American West through periods of migration, settlement, and modernization Discusses Native Americans and their conflicts and integration with American settlers
Few episodes in American history were more transformative than World War II, and in no region did it bring greater change than in the West. Having lifted the United States out of the Great Depression, World War II set in motion a massive westward population movement, ignited a quarter-century boom that redefined the West as the nation's most economically dynamic region, and triggered unprecedented public investment in manufacturing, education, scientific research, and infrastructure—an economic revolution that would lay the groundwork for prodigiously innovative high-tech centers in Silicon Valley, the Puget Sound area, and elsewhere. Amidst robust economic growth and widely shared prosperity in the post-war decades, Westerners made significant strides toward greater racial and gender equality, even as they struggled to manage the environmental consequences of their region's surging vitality. At the same time, wartime policies that facilitated the federal withdrawal of Western public lands and the occupation of Pacific islands for military use continued an ongoing project of U.S. expansionism at home and abroad. This volume explores the lasting consequences of a pivotal chapter in U.S. history, and offers new categories for understanding the post-war West. Contributors to this volume include Mark Brilliant, Geraldo L. Cadava, Matthew Dallek, Mary L. Dudziak, Jared Farmer, David M. Kennedy, Daniel J. Kevles, Rebecca Jo Plant, Gavin Wright, and Richard White.
On 8 July 1921 a Truce between the IRA and British forces in Ireland was announced, to begin three days later. However, in those three days at least sixty people from both sides of the conflict were killed. In 'Truce', Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc goes back to the facts to reveal what actually happened in those three bloody days, and why. What sparked Belfast’s 'Bloody Sunday’ in 1921, the worst bout of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland’s troubled history? Why were four unarmed British soldiers kidnapped and killed by the IRA in Cork just hours before the ceasefire began? Who murdered Margaret Keogh, a young Dublin rebel, in cold blood on her own doorstep? Were the last spies shot by the IRA really working for British intelligence or just the victims of anti-Protestant bigotry?
