Woman in Nineteenth-Century America

The political use of Woman as a universal category, transcending social divisions, has fallen into disrepute. Yet it is necessary, in looking at gender history, to understand not just its obfuscations but its sources and political effects. The essay proposes an intellectual and political history of the uses of the term Woman and a social history of the heterogeneous mixtures of women from different social groups who seized the term and gave it force. Discussing recent scholarship on white and Afro-American women, Stansell argues for the importance of moments of extravagant universalising to the history of women in politics.     

Playing for Ireland in foreign fields: the Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish nationalism in America

With a few exceptions, the existing scholarship on the relationship between the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and Irish nationalism has largely overlooked the experiences of the Irish diaspora. This article seeks to redress this neglect by exploring the ways in which Irish nationalism has historically been produced, reproduced and contested amongst members of the GAA in the USA. In light of their status as focal points of Irish immigration and as centres of Gaelic games activity in America, the article focuses on the cities of Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It draws on extensive archival and interview research conducted in each locale since 2000 and reveals that while intensely politicised and ethnic versions of Irish nationalism have historically weaved their way through US branches of the Association, since the mid-1990s there have been a number of socio-economic and political developments both in Ireland and in America that have seen the GAA begin to articulate a more civic, less ethnically bounded version of Irish nationalism.     

The Forgotten History of the Protestant Crusade: Religious Liberalism in Ireland1

Irish historians do not generally identify religious liberalism as a feature of the 1820s. Instead, they have mapped religious conflict onto increasingly binary conflicts in the socio‐economic, cultural, and political spheres. The “Second Reformation” missionary movement put evangelicals and Catholics on a direct collision course and, consequently, historians have argued that it was a key factor in the emergence both of Irish Catholic nationalism and Protestant defensive co‐operation. However, the Crusade also produced a strong Protestant backlash alongside the growing sectarian conflict. In County Limerick, for example, two versions of Church of Ireland opposition emerged during 1820, among high church clergy including Bishop Jebb and among liberal Protestant gentlemen. Instead of closing down debate into rigid binary opposition along sectarian lines, the Limerick evidence shows that the Crusade produced a much more complex religious, social, and political debate than historians have recognised which, in turn, made possible a wider range of responses to key Irish problems.     

The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America

My research into the "Mormon Question" has blurred disciplinary boundaries, demonstrating that legal history occurs outside the confines of law books, out in the world of popular culture, political cartooning, and sermonizing, and even in outbreaks of violence. This article is designed to illustrate how an entire body of constitutional law was made in opposition to the marital and sexual arrangements of Mormons in the Utah Territory in the nineteenth century.