history – Page 6 – Slugger O'Toole

The extraordinary war/emergency story of one British made Irish flown Supermarine Walrus (L2301)…

Mick Fealty on June 13, 2012, 11:54 am

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Courtesy of Ciaran on Twitter… and the Fleet Air Arm museum in Yeovilton, Somerset… here’s the story of one aircraft which was delivered to the Irish Army Air Corps just prior to the outbreak of World War Two (or The Emergency as you Mexicans call it)… 1939 – built at Woolston, Southampton for the Fleet Air Arm to Specification 37/36, contract 5344422/36. Diverted prior to issue to Irish Army Air Corps 24/02/1939 – first flight wearing ‘B’ condition markings; Serial …

Euro crisis: “Rome wasn’t built in a day and it didn’t fall in a day either…”

Pete Baker on May 25, 2012, 3:21 pm

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The eurozone crisis rumbles on, its democratic deficit intact, and Ireland’s Fiscal Treaty referendum approaches. Time, then, for historian Michael Wood to go looking for some historical references… The British historian Gildas (c 500-570) in his diatribe against contemporary rulers in the early 500s, looking back over the story of the Fall of Roman Britain, lists the military failures, but behind them he speaks bitterly of a loss of nerve and direction, a failure of “group feeling”. Gildas talks about …

Lost and Found: In Search of Owen Roe O’Neill

Hiram Morgan on May 18, 2012, 10:13 am

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Maybe you can help me with a little piece of research? Recently an authentic image of Hugh O’Neill, the great earl of Tyrone, was discovered in a fresco in the Vatican but one of his nephew Owen Roe remains elusive. His story, dying in Castle Oughter County Cavan in command of an intact Ulster army as Cromwell advanced across Ireland, is full of fanciful potential. As a successful commander in the Spanish army, Don Eugenio, as he was known, would …

A quick backward glance on European History…

Mick Fealty on May 16, 2012, 1:36 pm

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At a time when politics and economics in Europe is busting open day by day, it’s probably as well to remember Europe didn’t always look the way it does today… UPdate: Thanks to salgado for the replacements… Mick FealtyMick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty

Shared Origins

Of This Island on April 22, 2012, 4:26 pm

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At least two centuries before the great boulders of Stonehenge were placed on a windswept Salisbury Plain, and over 500 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza rose from the deserts of Egypt, Neolithic architects in the Boyne Valley (Brú na Bóinne) were laying the foundations of one of the most studied structures of the ancient world. An imposing earthen mound in County Meath (an Mhí), its original name has been lost to the jealous mists of history. But the …

Clinkers, Rivets and Flatcaps: Celebrating Titanic and the Men Who Built Her.

Of This Island on April 15, 2012, 11:30 am

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The panicked screams of the dying could be heard long after Titanic broke in two and finally slipped under the icy waters of the North Atlantic. By the time the last voices faded and the inky dark became silence once more, over 1,500 souls had met a terrifying and lonely fate. The disaster was a human tragedy from start to finish, the consequences made even more poignant by a sequence of poor and hurried decision making from conception to demise. …

“This is part of the culture of Ireland”

Pete Baker on March 30, 2012, 7:00 pm

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Even though a group of 4 gold torcs were discovered near Stirling in 2009, they’re not that common. According to the BBC report, Dr Greer Ramsey from Armagh County Museum told Belfast coroner, John Leckey, that “10 torcs have been discovered in Ireland and 38 in Britain”. ANYhoo… the coroner has ruled that a [IIRC] 47 37 inch long flange-twisted gold torc, found in a bog in County Fermanagh, is an item of treasure. And, as we know, “strange things happen in the bog“. From the BBC report It …

Why half centenaries are deadlier than the decade of centenaries just about to begin…

Mick Fealty on March 28, 2012, 2:59 pm

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FitzJamesHorse’s blog has great piece on history and human memory, not least on what living through a violent period of history reveals about ordinary life… You should really read the whole thing, but here’s his conclusion: I believe that the present obsession with the Decade of Centenaries……..Ulster Covenant (1912), Easter (1916), Somme (1916), Partition (1922)………deflects from a Decade of Half-Centenaries…….the O’Neill Years (1963-70), the first murders of the modern Troubles (John Scullion and Peter Ward in 1966), the first Civil …

Does History Matter? BBC NI’s Festival of History & Broadcasting

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on February 17, 2012, 8:30 am

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BBC NI Festival of History and Broadcasting

I gave up history at the age of 14. Keeping on three sciences meant that it was a straight choice between geography and history. As a result, my knowledge of history is confined to the legend of Finn McCool, the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, and a link between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in an open top charabanc and the start of the First World War. Maybe if Horrible Histories had been around twenty five years ago I might …

Don’t denude Stormont of unionist monuments. Let’s have nationalist ones too. What might they be?

Brian Walker on February 16, 2012, 12:30 pm

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Odd that the table on which the Union was signed and a portrait of the Queen by a local artist have been quietly removed from Stormont, according to Jim Allister, a hawk eyed stirrer of eminence. These items are surely less controversial than the bronzes of Carson and Craig and the old boy’s grave outside the south entrance. Will someone wage a useless battle to have the statues removed and dig the old boy and his wife up? There’s …

Boomers’ memories of the Great

Brian Walker on February 11, 2012, 10:35 am

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Ian Jack has a fine nostalgia piece in the Guardian – no, better than that, a piece about the collective memory of passing generations – linking the not altogether compatible elements of the Dickens bicentenary to the monarchy. The link he made was not with Empire or English images of national virtue so often disputed in Slugger, but with a workaday industrial world now vanished, which a visit by the Queen memorialised for those who saw her. Make no mistake: …

Odyssey Marine to recover Victory, but lose ‘Black Swan’ treasure

Pete Baker on February 2, 2012, 5:08 pm

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Last seen somewhere off the Irish coast, US company Odyssey Marine Exploration have announced that they have “executed an agreement with the Maritime Heritage Foundation for the financing, archaeological survey and excavation, conservation and exhibit of HMS Victory (1744) and artifacts from the shipwreck site.” That’s Admiral Balchin’s HMS Victory – a 100-gun first-rate ship of the line lost in 1744 in the English Channel. It confirms an earlier report in the Sunday Times. There may be four tonnes of gold …

The UK comprises four nations not two and its history is a lot more complicated than many seem to appreciate

Mick Fealty on January 30, 2012, 3:44 pm

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Nice piece from David Torrence at the Steamie (H/T Phil) Is any of this important? I think it is, not only because the history of any state is important, but also because the story of the United Kingdom gave rise to much of the political terminology we still use today. For example the term “Unionist”, in party political terms, refers not to those wishing to preserve the Union between Scotland and England, but those who want to retain the Union …

If history is war by other means, is truth the first casulty?

Mick Fealty on January 9, 2012, 3:09 pm

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There’s a fascinating exchange on Will Crawley’s Sunday Sequence programme yesterday (begins about half way through). It talks about the Boston College oral history archive (which is still ongoing). Danny Morrison just before the end notes that history, so far as he is concerned is ‘war but by other means’. If this year’s state papers anything to go by that may be a battle Sinn Fein must brace itself for on a yearly basis. As luck would have it, history …

Archimedes’ bellyache

Pete Baker on October 27, 2011, 3:13 pm

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Having been subjected to X-ray fluorescence, and then some multispectral imaging, the 13th Century Archimedes Palimpsest may have finally revealed its last secret – “that Archimedes, working in the third century BC, considered the concept of actual infinity, something thought to have only been developed in the 19th century, and anticipated calculus.” The Palimpsest, constructed in the 13th Century mostly from an erased 10th Century copy of works by Archimedes, is currently the subject of an exhibition at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum where …

Door now bolted, all inquiries into our past lead to a dead end…

Mick Fealty on May 25, 2011, 1:11 pm

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It’s not surprising given the huge shockwaves it sent through Northern Irish society at the time that the Rosemary Nelson murder inquiry‘s (cost £46m) findings and is relatively threadbare in it’s conclusions after all such inquiries have had their teeth unceremoniously plucked out by the Inquiries Act 2005. At any rate it did not say what many wanted to it say: ie that the RUC somehow colluded in her killing. Eamonn has a lengthy post on it in which he turns …

“I’m sure the Queen, who must feel a bit constrained in her day job, will understand the tug.”

Pete Baker on May 20, 2011, 3:19 pm

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The Guardian’s Michael White covers a lot of ground in his post at the Big G’s Politics blog – including the crisis in the eurozone. But here’s a, lengthy, excerpt to start with. If Gaelic had a word for chutzpah (perhaps it does?), the Sinn Féin president, now an Irish TD (MP), would win the chutzpah prize every time. He was on his best behaviour for the Queen’s trip – even he can see it has been a modest success. …

Bill Craig came to his senses too late

Brian Walker on April 30, 2011, 12:49 pm

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Interesting to see that the Guardian has marked Bill Craig’sdeath at 86 with a Chris Ryder obit and touching to see that Mark follows the peculiar Irish practice of warning against speaking ill of the recently dead. Sam McBride’s” Political Giant” is infected by similar sentimentality on the unionist side. But critical comment on Craig’s record is fully justified. In government and out of it, he fanned the flames of disorder, from the fateful ban on the Derry Civil Right march …

Garret fails to account for era of political corruption

Brian Walker on April 17, 2011, 11:37 pm

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In part 2 of his musings on civic morality in the Republic, Garret FitzGerald tackles the question of why the lack of it only became fatal in recent decades in a most tortuous and evasive piece of prose. The old warriors of the independence era at least had personal integrity in common, he says. When they were about to pass on, the Fianna Failers among them chose Garret and other political opponents to confide their death bed fears. when …

New tales of Empire from David Cameron

Brian Walker on April 5, 2011, 11:01 pm

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A small treat for students of British imperialism especially in Ireland where the agenda of withdrawal from Empire was set. Only the Daily Telegraph so far picks out a headline on these remarks by David Cameron who is keen to make a new start with Pakistan. Odd, coming from the leader of the historic party of Empire where the orthodoxy remains that the civilising mission, however flawed then and anachronistic today, wasn’t all humbug. Is Cameron taking Tory modernisation to new heights of revisionism or will he as I …