Social History (Other)
In 1917 more than 6,000 American sailors arrived in Ireland, the first United States troops deployed to front line service during the First World War. From a social perspective, all was not plain sailing. This podcast tells the story of...
When the American Civil War broke out in April 1861, Ireland’s Nation newspaper predicted that the lives of Irish emigrants would be “offered in thousands. Many a mother’s heart in Ireland, long cheered by the affectionate and dutiful letter and the generous...
New Yorker Marshall Bailey’s moment in the sun came late in life. The summer of 1910 found the elderly American Civil War veteran in dire straits, consigned to life as a pauper far from the country of his birth. His...
James Butler was born in Kereen (Aglish), Co. Waterford in 1878. His family were poor– extremely poor. In 1891 his elderly father John, a labourer, died in nearby Dungarvan Workhouse. It was a place James and his family would come...
The New York Irish-American was a major weekly newspaper serving America’s ethnic Irish community. It provided thousands of emigrants across the United States with news concerning both their local communities and their former homes in Ireland. Then, as now, advertising...
I have recently been researching Irish-born men and women who served in North American forces during the Second World War. A little over a year ago, while working on files relating to servicemen who lost their lives in Canadian forces,...
Although the main focus of this site is (and will remain) the Irish experience of the American Civil War, I thought readers may also be interested in some work I am conducting on a later aspect of the U.S. military,...
The 4th of July is Independence Day in the United States, marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress on 4th July 1776. Unsurprisingly given the nature of the conflict between 1775 and 1783, there were...
150 years ago, on the evening of Tuesday 22nd December, 1863, a stunned Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Reed prepared to send a message that promised to send shockwaves through New York City. The commander of the 69th New York National Guard Artillery...
In 1925 newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic carried the story of the ‘Old Man of the Sea’. about a Corkman travelling back from the United States to live with his sister in Newport, Wales. He was thought to...