Archive for the ‘The Irish’ Category
Thursday, March 14th, 2013
Even in broad daylight, Dunluce Castle is a rather eerie place. Stark stone ruins reach toward the sky like skeletal fingers digging up their way up out of the ground. But that description fits at least half the castle ruins in Ireland, a place where stone ruins are about as common as McDonalds golden arches are in America. Dunluce sits precariously on stone outcroppings high above the ocean, but that’s not terribly unusual in Ireland either. Maybe what gives Dunluce it’s unique mournful quality is the part of it that is not sitting precariously on stone outcroppings above the ocean–because it fell into the ocean during the middle of a party.
The tragedy has been embellished over time, so it’s hard to know exactly what happened that night. It was in 1639, a few years after the second Earl of Antrim took up residence in the castle. (more…)
Tags: Antrim, castle collapse, Dunluce Castle, Earl of Antrim, Katherine Manners, kitchen collapse, Randal MacDonnell
Posted in Kate Dolan, Latest Posts, Living History, The Irish | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
Some people are excited to go to New York to see a Broadway show. Some plan elaborate shopping trips. Some come to see famous sights like the Statue of Liberty.
But the last time I traveled to New York, I went to see an old tenement, or more specifically, an old tenement building that has been turned into a museum. 
The word “tenement” has an ugly connotation these days, but it really just means apartment or apartment building. It brings to mind much more than that, though. We think of long dark hallways, dingy rooms with stained wallpaper, appalling sanitation and immigrants living in dire poverty. (more…)
Tags: immigrant experience, New York City, social history museums, Tenement Museum, tenements, urban poor
Posted in Latest Posts, Living History, The Irish | 7 Comments »
Sunday, June 5th, 2011
On this day in 1870, Jacob Riis stepped off a ship from Denmark to begin a new life in New York. The immigration office found him a job in western Pennsylvania, but news of a war in Europe prompted him to soon return to New York City to volunteer to serve in the French Army.
The French Army didn’t want him. He had sold everything down to his boots to pay for the trip to New York, so now he was destitute and homeless. During the summer, he was able to find some seasonal work just outside the city, but when those jobs ended in the fall, he “joined the great army of tramps…fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway.”
He spent weeks sleeping in doorways or alleys in the most notorious neighborhood in the country, Five Points. He was even evicted from the police station and put on a ferry to Jersey City. (more…)
Tags: Five Points, How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis, New York
Posted in Latest Posts, Living History, The Irish | 4 Comments »
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
When Irish landlords started shipping their starving tenants to North America in the mid-19th Century (either to help the tenants or to help themselves by avoiding the extra poor tax), most of the immigrants chose to go to New York. It soon became much cheaper to send them to Canada (see my earlier post on the “coffin ships”) so some landed in Quebec instead. But many of them soon made their way to New York anyway, because they already had friends or families there. In New York they could be sure to find people from their home county, or even their home neighborhood.
Unfortunately, they would most likely find those friends in Five Points, the most notorious neighborhood slum in the world.
(more…)
Tags: Charles Dickens, Five Points, Irish immigration, New York tenements, Old Brewery
Posted in Latest Posts, Living History, The Irish | 7 Comments »
Thursday, March 17th, 2011
They say everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. And that’s a good thing, because otherwise, St. Patrick wouldn’t be Irish.
He was the son of a Roman official, probably born sometime between the years 390 and 420. Legend gives his homeland as Taruanna (now spelled Thérouanne) which is in modern day France, but the settlement he lists as his home, Bannavem Taburniae, is now thought to have been somewhere in England or Wales. Whatever the case, he wasn’t from Ireland.
In his mid-teens, Patrick was captured by Irish raiders and brought to Ireland where he was sold into slavery and worked as a shepherd for six years. Then he escaped. (more…)
Tags: Irish church, St. Patrick, St. Patrick's Confessions
Posted in Latest Posts, Living History, The Irish | 6 Comments »
Monday, March 14th, 2011
The term “Celtic” is often seen as synonymous with Irish, but the Celts were not really Irish. Not originally, at least. The original Irish people were a Stone Age culture that thrived (okay, no one knows if they did that well, but at least they existed) on the island nearly as far back as 9000 B.C. This Mesolithic culture was replaced by a “New Stone Age” culture around 3000 B.C. I’m wondering if these guys were like a cross between the Flintstones and the Lucky Charms leprechaun, the modern stone age family with funny accents. Anyway, the people of this Neolithic culture created elaborate stone burial mounds such as Newgrange, built about 500 years before the pyramids. This and similar burial mounds are aligned with the rising sun on the winter solstice. (more…)
Tags: Bronze Age, Celtic Revival, Celts, Ireland, Irish horns, Newgrange
Posted in Latest Posts, Living History, The Irish | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
Continuing with my March series about all things Irish – here’s where the luck of the Irish runs out: the coffin ships.
I’ve always been of the opinion that the Irish and English are not nearly as different as they believe themselves to be. And I’m not sure how much of the suffering from the potato famine can legitimately be blamed on the English. But there are a few instances where that blame seems pretty clear, and one instance is the coffin ships. (more…)
Tags: coffin ships, Grosse Isle, Irish emigration, potato famine, typhus
Posted in Latest Posts, Living History, The Irish | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
This month, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’m going to write about Irish things, or more accurately, Irish-American things since the holiday is really an American one. Regardless of the celebration’s origins as an Irish Catholic day of prayer, it is now a day when Americans come out to celebrate being Irish or at least pretending to have the capacity to drink mythic quantities of green beer. And the Irish, well, they come out to watch the Americans. Even in Ireland.
(more…)
Tags: Irish emigration, Irish-American, New York, St. Patrick's Day
Posted in Latest Posts, Living History, The Irish | 8 Comments »
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