You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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 lead to mortality. Workhouses were swamped with thousands who had subsisted on public works and soup kitchens earlier, and who now gathered in ragged crowds. Unable to cope, workhouse staff were forced to witness hundreds die where they lay, outside the walls. The next phase of degradation was the clearances, or exterminations in popular parlance which took place on a colossal scale. From late 1847 an exodus had begun. The Famine slowly came to an end from late 1849 but the longer term consequences were to reverberate through future decades.
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 lead to mortality. Workhouses were swamped with thousands who had subsisted on public works and soup kitchens earlier, and who now gathered in ragged crowds. Unable to cope, workhouse staff were forced to witness hundreds die where they lay, outside the walls. The next phase of degradation was the clearances, or exterminations in popular parlance which took place on a colossal scale. From late 1847 an exodus had begun. The Famine slowly came to an end from late 1849 but the longer term consequences were to reverberate through future decades.
This case study of a town and its rural hinterland during the Great Famine highlights the cumulative and shattering impact of disastrous government relief policies on a population rendered prostrate by repeated failures of the potato harvest. It outlines the shambles of public works, the loathed soup kitchens, and most horrifically the appalling disease and mortality that occurred both inside and outside the Ennis Union workhouse and its auxiliaries after 1847. This book also illuminates the huge upsurge in crime, desperate individual attempts to survive by stealing, and collective attempts to prevent the outward movement of food supplies. The brutal outrages of secret societies, and harsh j...
Figures in a Famine Landscape is a ground-breaking study that follows a number of individuals involved in different public capacities in a particularly afflicted district of Ireland during the Great Famine. The thinking and actions of each had a major effect on the existences - and the survival - of scores of thousands of the destitute poor in Ireland at a crucial point in the country's history. Among these figures are an outspoken newspaper editor; two clergymen (one Catholic, one Protestant); two highly qualified and busy physicians; two landlords and an exterminating agent; a Board of Works official and a Poor Law inspector. Taking an exhaustive approach to source material that includes private diaries, letters, official reports and correspondence, police files, parliamentary papers and a wealth of newspapers, in this enthralling study the author builds up an in-depth, almost microscopic picture of each individual, providing a unique and very human lens through which to view the Great Famine.
During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that Britain was in large part responsible for the extent of the national tragedy, and in fact engineered the food shortage in one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. So strong was anti-Irish sentiment i...
Famine Echoes gives a unique perspective on the greatest tragedy in Irish history as descendants of Famine survivors recall the community memories of the great hunger.
Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in Ó Gráda's new work, the advent of the blight phytophthora infestans transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years. Central to Irish and British hist...
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. This book considers how such a near total decimation of a country by natural causes could take place in industrialized, 19th century Europe and situates the Great Famine alongside other world famines for a more globally informed approach. It ...
Even considering recent advances in the development of women's studies as a discipline, women remain underrepresented in the history and historiography of the Great Hunger. The various roles played by women, including as landowners, relief-givers, philanthropists, proselytizers and providers for the family, have received little attention.This publication examines the diverse and still largely unexplored role of women during the Great Hunger, shedding light on how women experienced and shaped the tragedy that unfolded in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. In addition to more traditional sources, the contributors also draw on folklore and popular culture.Women and the Great Hunger brings together the work of some of the leading researchers in Irish studies, with new scholarship, methodologies and perspectives.This book takes a major step toward advancing our understanding of the Great Hunger.