On October 15th, 1861, as the young Army of the Potomac was busy preparing for future campaigning, Brigadier General John H. Martindale rode out to Hall’s Hill, Virginia, to inspect a regiment that had recently been added to the brigade...
This is the second part in a series of articles by myself and several guest contributors, chronicling the lives of several related Hamilton emigrants from County Tyrone. While Part 1 explored the emigration and early career of William Hamilton, Part...
Although American Civil War Roundtables are widespread in the United States, they are much thinner on the ground across the Atlantic. Somewhat surprisingly, despite the scale of Irish involvement in the conflict, there is no dedicated group in Ireland that...
This is the first part in a series of articles by myself and several guest contributors, chronicling the lives of several related Hamilton emigrants from County Tyrone. While our first subject, William Hamilton, fought in the American Civil War, the...
We Have Them On Our Own Ground: Zouaves at Gettysburg by Shaun C. Grenan, Illustrated by Mark Maritato. Independently Published. 92pp. 2021. I’ve long held a peculiar fascination with Zouaves, which is possibly rooted in a story my Great Uncle...
Within the files of Irish Americans who died during the American Civil War, certain engagements crop up again and again. As a general rule, the very worst battlefields of the war for Irish Americans were those that took the greatest...
This March I delivered a short talk for the CelticMKE St. Patrick’s Day at Home Festival. I concentrated on how units such as the Irish Brigade and the 9th Massachusetts celebrated St. Patrick’s Day during the American Civil War, with...
The new post comes from regular contributor Brendan Hamilton, who needs no introduction on the site. It brings another insight into Brendan’s fantastic and pioneering research on the boys from the North’s Houses of Refuge who found themselves in Union...
A great many of the men interred at Andersonville National Cemetery died of illnesses associated with starvation and exposure. For those Irish within the camp who had endured the Great Famine, many of the ailments they saw must have seemed...
John Dineen was born in Cork around 1846. Somtime during the 1850s he emigrated with his parents to Lawrence, Massachusetts, a town which provided employment to large numbers of Irish immigrants in its textile mills. On 5th June 1862, when...