The Gothic and the Gaelic: Exploring the Place of Castles in Ireland’s Celtic Revival

This paper examines the conflict in early nineteenth century Ireland that emerged between the way castles were portrayed in academia on the one hand and romantic literature on the other. Focusing on a key text of the Celtic Revival, Sydney Owensons The Wild Irish Girl, the paper explores how this novel (with its strong gothic influences) established a lens through which Gaelic Ireland could be understood and how this in turn affected the representation of castles. The second part of the paper ties these themes into an analysis of the relationship between architecture, literature and identity in the occupation of Leap Castle, Co. Offaly during the changing political climate of nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.     

Archaeology and the Irish rediscovery of the Celtic past

This article examines the place of archaeology in the second wave of Irish cultural nationalism, and how archaeological findings were appropriated by rival ethno‐religious communities in Ireland. In particular, it focuses on George Petrie, who was the founder of ‘scientific’ archaeology and was also one of the leading figures in the nineteenth‐century Celtic revival that sought a moral regeneration of the Irish nation In Ireland, as elsewhere, archaeology was important in reconstructing an early history of the nation where few written records existed and in making this visible through material artefacts. However, archaeology was only significant as part of a wider cultural revival that presented artefacts and sites as national symbols to an island undergoing rapid social change. This article will explore the relationship between archaeology and this national revival, and how the material objects recovered by archaeologists extended and transformed the existing repertoires of how the nation was imagined and felt. It will assess the different reception of these images in the rival Catholic and Protestant communities. Finally, it will comment on the capacity of a medieval ‘Celtic’ repertoire to provide the basis of a dynamic modern Irish national culture.     

Social Archaeologies of “Utopian” Settlements in Ireland

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a number of “Ideal” or “Utopian” type settlements were established across Ireland. These tended to be religious groupings or “model” communities associated with industry. In the southwest a number of short-lived cooperative communities were established along Owenite principles which continue to play an integral part in the radical histories of the country. This paper examines the archaeologies of these sites and analyses the role of individual in their formation and collapse and addresses the social archaeology of their construct and layout. It is suggested that contemporary hierarchical norms were actually reproduced in these communities and this segregation is reflected in the physical morphology of the settlements.     

Social Change in 19th-Century Rural Ireland and the Archaeology of the Narrow-Gauge Railway: The Case of Munster

Abstract

Railways are unusual archaeological entities. They lasted, in many cases, only for a short length of time, and in their locomotive-hauled form are of quite recent origin. There is a signifi cant amount of documentary information available, making it well-nigh impossible, as well as inadvisable, to rely solely on the extant material remains. The fact that later incarnations of some of these lines remain in existence today and are to a degree part of our lives means that we possess preconceived notions about rail travel. Railways have featured heavily in literature and art, as well as having infl uenced the development of communication networks, politics and social issues. All of these combined, aside from drawing our awareness to the magnitude of the importance of railways, make it difficult to look at them from an archaeological perspective, or to see what an archaeological perspective can bring to the study of railways. This paper examines what an archaeological study of the narrow-gauge railways of Munster (the south-west of Ireland) can contribute to an understanding of broader patterns of social change in 19th-century rural Ireland.     

Living above the shop: home, business, and family in the English "Industrial Revolution"

This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the "household family" into the nineteenth century (rather than its more modern, "nuclear" variant) and the existence of keenly felt gradations of status within households making it likely that the constitution of "the family" differed according to one's place in the domestic hierarchy.     

Instantiating Vision at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

This article examines the how the educational ideals of Mary Lyon, founder of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, were instantiated in the built environment of the seminary she founded in the early nineteenth century. It is an exploration of how Lyon's vision of place contributed to the creation and transformation of gendered lives for middle‐ and lower‐class women from rural New England. While working within the restraints of a male‐dominated social and economic climate, Lyon both conforms to and resists the accepted gender roles that expected women to be subservient and obedient. Intent on changing the nature of women's educational and professional lives, Lyon refashioned notions of what it meant to be dependent yet dedicated to developing a life of the mind. Specific attention is given to how the built environment of the seminary served to further inculcate Lyon's belief in order, routine, and familial harmony all in the service of educating young women in preparation for both domestic and professional lives.     

“Boys indifferent to the manly sports of their race”: nationalism and children’s sport in Ireland, 1880–1920

ABSTRACT

The late nineteenth century saw Irish children being exposed to formal sport in an unprecedented fashion. This era coincided with Ireland’s so-called Gaelic Revival and the emergence of a virulent nationalism that helped fuel the Irish Revolutionary period which followed. Yet little research has been conducted on how nationalists used sport in their efforts to entice children into their campaigns for Ireland’s cultural and political independence. This study examines the part which sport, particularly Gaelic games, played in attempts to inspire devotion to the ideal of an Irish-Ireland among the nation’s children. It explores the efforts to promote native sports as the games of choice for children across the school grounds and playing fields of Ireland and the influence of nationalist media propaganda in this endeavour. Finally, it considers the role of sport in the training and physical culture of an array of Irish youth movements which arose at this time.     

Sara Ruddick's theory of maternal thinking applied to traditional Irish mothering

This paper uses Sara Ruddick's theory of maternal thinking to explain patterns of Irish mothering that developed in Ireland following the Great Famine of 1845-1852. Ruddick's central thesis, that maternal thinking develops strategies for preserving the life of the child, fostering the child's growth, and shaping an acceptable child, is applied to the intersecting influences of famine memory, religion, education, and emigration in post-famine Ireland. The strict, moralistic, and highly inhibiting features of Irish culture that dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are traceable to patterns of mothering that developed after the famine. While Irish mothers are often blamed for instilling values that stressed sexual repression and guilt, other cultural factors influenced maternal thinking. Mothers did foster highly repressive moral values that encouraged permanent celibacy and delayed marriage. This paper examines the larger cultural features that derived from political oppression and the famine as they imprinted these values.     

Women's and Children's Quarters in Golden Gate Park,San Francisco

This paper explores the mythic domesticity encoded in the Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The play area, opened in 1888, represented a new genre of gender-specific public space developed in urban parks in the late nineteenth century. In welcoming women to the public domain of the urban park, gendered spaces such as the Children's Quarter signified a complex response to changing class and gender identities in the nineteenth-century city. Imposing a domestic structure on women's public presence, the Children's Quarter modeled a middle-class domestic ideal, affirming women's essential association with the private sphere even as it welcomed them to the public sphere of the urban park.     

Engendered/endangered: women,tuberculosis, and the project of citizenship

The anti-tuberculosis campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an unprecedented display of medical authority and public health purview. With accumulating evidence that the disease disproportionately struck the poor, tuberculosis by the early decades of the century was perceived epidemiologically as embedded in individual practices including hygiene and domestic order. Tuberculosis was in a sense a trope for national degeneration, and as such it became the vehicle for a self-conscious thrust towards national renewal and moral regeneration. This paper uses a feminist Foucauldian framework in its analysis of the anti-tuberculosis campaign. In the case of San Francisco, efforts to combat tuberculosis centred in part on women in their roles as wives and mothers. Women were the gatekeepers of health because they were responsible for keeping the home clean and bacillus free. Not only did this focus become a medical legitimization of women's domestic duties, but it also became a discourse of citizenship. Whether explicitly or implicitly, physicians concentrated their attention on white middle class women in their messages of health maintenance. Within sanatoria, a primary agenda of tuberculosis treatment was the inculcation of middle class behaviour into the working class patients. The anti-tuberculosis campaign was thus a part of the early-twentieth-century project of nationhood where citizenship was largely calculated through the lens of class and race.     

The social magic of correspondence: conceptions of the mails in early nineteenth century Ireland

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the post in Ireland underwent fundamental changes in terms of its methods of operation, the scope of its delivery and the actual usage of the postal service. The volume of mail sent, the changing pattern of delivery routes and the time and expense of sending a letter all changed over the course of the century. The conceptions of the post were changing from that of being a purely functional instrument of limited appeal to that of being an acknowledged tool in the growth and development of industry and trade, in the operation of the structures of government and a vital link for individuals to people and places outside their immediate social circle. This paper draws upon various sources, both those of the state and of private individuals, and uses Bourdieu's theoretical perspectives, to build a framework for analysing the differing conceptions of the mails. These changing conceptions reveal how different groups positioned themselves in order to take advantage of and shape new forms of cultural capital in the early nineteenth century.     

“A Solitary Place of Retreat”: Renaissance Privacy and Irish Architecture

Many specialists in architectural history assign the beginning of an explicitly-articulated need for privacy to any time between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, and they identify elements such as closets, hallways, and separate servant quarters as indicators of that need. Meanings assigned to privacy range from the retirement of the lord and lady from the great hall into the chamber, to the withdrawal of the nuclear family in the home, and to a psychological need of the individual human being to be alone. This paper examines the problem of privacy and its architectural manifestations using case-studies from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland.     

Problems of spatial and temporal continuity of rural settlement in Ireland,A.D. 400 to 1169

In Ireland the period A.D. 400 to 1169 is characterized by an abundance of field evidence for dispersed enclosed homesteads known as ring-forts. This paper examines a number of hypotheses concerning the spatial characteristics of ring-forts in an attempt to explain puzzling discontinuities in their distributional pattern. Environmental constraints and evidence for alternative settlement forms are discussed. The significance of place-name elements in the understanding of social organization and settlement is critically examined; and attention is focused on the relationship between indigenous Irish settlement and alien settlement forms introduced at the time of the Norman conquest.     

“For the Means of Your Subsistence ... Look Under God to Your Own Industry and Frugality”: Life and Labor in Gerrit Smith's Peterboro

The rural hamlet of Peterboro, the home of Gerrit Smith, the nineteenth century's most famous social reformer, has been portrayed as an idyllic and peaceful community free of class conflict. The extensive documentary record suggests a less harmonious situation and indicates that the community was fraught with struggle, engendered as much by Smith's reform efforts as by general class relations. This article examines class-based struggle through several vignettes, including a look at the voting patterns of the Liberty party in Smithfield, the social conditions of African Americans who lived in Peterboro, and the story of the temperance hotel.     

Constructing Identities in Early Iron Age Thessaly: The Case of the Halos Tumuli

This paper examines the Early Iron Age tumulus–cemetery of Halos in south–eastern Thessaly, with its unique cremation pyre–cairn combination. As there are no parallels for such combination of burial practices either in Thessaly or in any other area of the Greek world, it has usually been suggested that the tumuli were erected by people foreign to Thessaly, most probably of a northern origin. This paper presents evidence suggesting a local custom closely related to the desire to create a new identity.     

Strategic planning for multicommunity rural development: Insights from Northern Ireland

This paper examines progress being made in the sphere of community‐led rural development in Northern Ireland. Multicommunity development practice carried out by the authors using a transactive model of strategic planning is reported. This case study is located in the borderlands of Ireland, in an area where contested traditions of culture and political allegiance are deeply rooted. The analysis explores, inter alia, the tensions associated with community group formation, the difficulties in winning consensus and how these problems were addressed, the origin and selection of projects, and the first steps towards implementation. By way of conclusion a number of key issues of arguably wider interest are identified: engaging in strategic planning, supporting multicommunity activity and forging new partnership arrangements.     

The House of Ussher: Histories and Heritages of Improvement,Conspicuous Consumption,and Eviction on an Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Estate

Arthur Ussher, owner of the Ballysaggartmore estate in west County Waterford in the early 1800s, was one among many notorious landlords in Ireland during the Great Famine of 1847–52. He is remembered to this day in the locality for evicting hungry tenants and demolishing their houses for the non-payment of rents on his small estate, having earlier secured some improvement of land-quality through their labor. Buildings and designed-landscape features of Ussher’s demesne remain today, and are capable of an archaeological reading. They speak eloquently, even spectacularly, of the self-aggrandizing values of his social class. Relatively little “tenant archaeology” survives above-ground on the former estate, and most of the sites of eviction before and during the Famine are unidentified, but the story of their removal, and of tenant resistance—or non-resistance, more accurately—to it, is of some interest to students of the historical archaeology of the period. This paper documents the rise and fall of the Ussher project, illuminating the social violence that was often unleashed from landlord culture through the agency of Improvement.     

Bicycles, ‘Barrows,and Donkeys: Pinning a Tale on the Irish Border

A popular smuggling story still told in Ireland concerns a man who crossed the border every day, either on a bicycle or wheeling a wheelbarrow, and usually carrying some sort of load; hay, turf, potatoes, or vegetables—goods that were free from customs duty. The suspicious officials subjected the traveller to regular searches but could never catch him out. This article contextualizes that story in the history of the Irish border during the mid twentieth century, and locates it within Irish folklore traditions, before exploring its probable origin in similar tales found outside Ireland.     

‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise,as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle‐Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910

In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale catalogues, and autobiographies. While the notion that domestic space should be divided between men and women had considerable cultural purchase, the ways in which this should occur were subject to dispute and limited by the practical contingencies of everyday living. In homes where gendered material culture was present, it exerted a powerful influence on childhood experience and the formation of adult identities.