A friend with Parkinson's Disease requested my help in his attempts to understand the famine and its impact on his ancestors in County Clare. Once I began reading the material he brought me I was impelled to discover more. I had already researched and written about an earlier period in Irish history - the Anglo-Norman invasion - and it seemed that everything that happened on both sides of the Irish Sea in the centuries that followed was instrumental in making the famine such a disaster. Our book is the result.
I wrote...
A Purgatory of Misery: How Victorian Liberals Turned a Crisis into a Disaster
This layman's attempt to understand the combination of factors that led to the worst humanitarian crisis in British history is important because such things are still happening elsewhere in the world. Is it possible for humanity to achieve the Liberal ideal of 'the greatest good for the greatest number' or are Malthus's predictions about the relationship between population and food production about to come true?
This product of intensive research by members of the Department of Geography at Cork University covers every aspect of the famine as experienced by the people who lived and died through it.
Lavishly illustrated with maps and facsimiles of actual documents it details everything from the design and administration of workhouses to the treatment of migrants upon arrival in Canada, the USA, and Australia. No other book provides such an eloquent and devastating narrative of the suffering experienced by Irish people during the period 1845-52.
Devoid of rhetoric, it displays the facts in easy-to-understand text and statistical analysis, enhanced with first-hand eye-witness accounts from letters and journal extracts.
Best Reference Books of 2012 presented by Library Journal
The Great Irish Famine is the most pivotal event in modern Irish history, with implications that cannot be underestimated. Over a million people perished between 1845-1852, and well over a million others fled to other locales within Europe and America. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The 2000 US census had 41 million people claim Irish ancestry, or one in five white Americans. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (1845-52) considers how such a near total decimation of…
Where the Atlas is a very large book compiled by a team of academics, O'Murchadha's smaller volume covers much the same ground.
He provides some context by opening with a portrait of Ireland before the onset of famine and concluding with a picture of Ireland in the years after. It is made human by the many anecdotes featuring the experiences of particular individulals and families from his native County Clare.
O'Murchadha is highly critical of the government's response to the famine, offering scathing critiques of the Poor Law, the Rate-In-Aid Act, and the beaurocratisation of relief, nevertheless his tone is generally well balanced. I regard both the Atlas and O'Murchada's book as essential reading for anyone with a genuine interest in understanding this watershed period in British-Irish relations.
This is an engaging and moving account of this most destructive event in Irish history. Over one million people died in the Great Famine, and more than one million more emigrated on the coffin ships to America and beyond. Drawing on contemporary eyewitness accounts and diaries, the book charts the arrival of the potato blight in 1845 and the total destruction of the harvests in 1846 which brought a sense of numbing shock to the populace. Far from meeting the relief needs of the poor, the Liberal public works programme was a first example of how relief policies would themselves…
This is the book to read if you are young or seeking something for a young reader.
The suffering and endurance of ordinary men women and children during those terrible years is described with empathy and admiration. It is also, as the book description states, "the story of the heroes among the Irish people and how they held on to hope."
In 1845, a disaster struck Ireland. Overnight, a mysterious blight attacked the potato crops, turning the potatoes black and destroying the only real food of nearly six million people.
Over the next five years, the blight attacked again and again. These years are known today as the Great Irish Famine, a time when one million people died from starvation and disease and two million more fled their homeland. Black Potatoes is the compelling story of men, women, and children who defied landlords and searched empty fields for scraps of harvested vegetables and edible weeds to eat,…
This is a book for members of the Irish diaspora. It tells of the experiences of your ancestors as they fled the conditions prevailing in their homeland.
Often single members of families whose objective was to earn money they could send back to Ireland in order to enable those family members left behind to follow. Too often the welcome they found, after travelling in appalling conditions as human cargo in ships unsuitable for the purpose, was not as warm as they had expected.
A story relevant today as we grapple with the problems created by modern migration from war- and/or famine-ravaged areas of the modern world, often still undertaken in unsuitable boats.
Between 1845 and 1855, 2 million Irish men and women fled their famine-ravaged homeland, many to settle in large British and American cities that were already wrestling with a complex array of urban problems. In this innovative work of comparative urban history, Matthew Gallman looks at how two cities, Philadelphia and Liverpool, met the challenges raised by the influx of immigrants. Gallman examines how citizens and policymakers in Philadelphia and Liverpool dealt with such issues as poverty, disease, poor sanitation, crime, sectarian conflict, and juvenile delinquency. By considering how two cities of comparable population and dimensions responded to similar challenges,…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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