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\"In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Genevan Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these imported revolutionaries would have a positive effect on the Irish populace. The experiment was abandoned, however, after the Calvinists demanded greater independence and more state money for their project. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans tells the story of a utopian city inspired by a spirit of liberty and republican values being turned into a place where republicans who had fought for liberty were extinguished by the might of empire. Richard Whatmore brings to life a violent age in which powerful states like Britain and France intervened in the affairs of smaller, weaker countries, justifying their actions on the grounds that they were stopping anarchists and terrorists from destroying society, religion and government. The Genevans and the Irish rebels, in turn, saw themselves as advocates of republican virtue, willing to sacrifice themselves for liberty, rights and the public good. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans shows how the massacre at Genevan Barracks marked an end to the old Europe of diverse political forms, and the ascendancy of powerful states seeking empire and markets--in many respects the end of Enlightenment itself\"-- Provided by publisher.

The story of the anti-slavery movement in Ireland is little known, yet when Frederick Douglass visited the country in 1845, he described Irish abolitionists as the most ‘ardent’ that he had ever encountered. Moreover, their involvement proved to be an important factor in ending the slave trade, and later slavery, in both the British Empire and in America. While Frederick Douglass remains the most renowned black abolitionist to visit Ireland, he was not the only one. This publication traces the stories of ten black abolitionists, including Douglass, who travelled to Ireland in the decades before the American Civil War, to win support for their cause. It opens with former slave, Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped as a boy from his home in Africa, and who was hosted by the United Irishmen in the 1790s; it closes with the redoubtable Sarah Parker Remond, who visited Ireland in 1859 and chose never to return to America. The stories of these ten men and women, and their interactions with Ireland, are diverse and remarkable.

Belfast Presbyterian radical Dr William Drennan (1754–1820) is widely regarded as the premier poet of the United Irishmen movement. However, while his significance as a key player in the political drama of the 1790s has been well documented, and his political poetry anthologized, few of Drennan's other poems have received critical attention. Permeating such neglected work from this poet of presbytery is an Irish dissenting, non-subscribing Unitarian Presbyterianism, which also crucially colors his famous political poems. It is proposed here that Drennan's muse is predominantly moral, specifically New Light, being the signature watermark of his chief poetical statements.

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading

This article analyzes an obscure early American author and activist, John Lithgow, and argues that his 1802 work Equality-a Political Romance deserves our special attention as a groundbreaking piece of writing about economic inequality and the democratic limits of republicanism at the core of the US national project. Specifically, Equality represents a singular development of utopian fiction responding to the political and economic exigencies of its historical moment, and in the process Lithgow inaugurates a variant of the genre-the American anticapitalist romance-that challenges our literary taxonomies, both in terms of utopianism and the literature of the early Republic. It is, finally, the rise of finance capitalism and the protracted depression of the early national era that conditions John Lithgow's serious exploration of anticapitalist ideas and experiment in utopian literature.

Remembering the Year of the French is a model of historical achievement, moving deftly between the study of historical events—the failed French invasion of the West of Ireland in 1798—and folkloric representationsof those events. Delving into the folk history found in Ireland’s rich oral traditions, Guy Beiner reveals alternate visions of the Irish past and brings into focus the vernacular histories, folk commemorative practices, and negotiations of memory that have gone largely unnoticed by historians. Beiner analyzes hundreds of hitherto unstudied historical, literary, and ethnographic sources. Though his focus is on 1798, his work is also a comprehensive study of Irish folk history and grass-roots social memory in Ireland. Investigating how communities in the West of Ireland remembered, well into the mid-twentieth century, an episode in the late eighteenth century, this is a “history from below” that gives serious attention to the perspectives of those who have been previously ignored or discounted. Beiner brilliantly captures the stories, ceremonies, and other popular traditions through which local communities narrated, remembered, and commemorated the past. Demonstrating the unique value of folklore as a historical source, Remembering the Year of the French offers a fresh perspective on collective memory and modern Irish history. Winner, Wayland Hand Competition for outstanding publication in folklore and history, American Folklore Society Finalist, award for the best book published about or growing out of public history, National Council on Public History Winner, Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff Prize for the best study of folklore or folk life in Great Britain and Ireland “An important and beautifully produced work. Guy Beiner here shows himself to be a historian of unusual talent.”—Marianne Elliott, Times Literary Supplement “Thoroughly researched and scholarly. . . . Beiner’s work is full of empathy and sympathy for the human remains, memorials, and commemorations of past lives and the multiple ways in which they actually continue to live.”—Stiofán Ó Cadhla, Journal of British Studies “A major contribution to Irish historiography.”—Maureen Murphy, Irish Literary Supplement \"A remarkable piece of scholarship . . . . Accessible, full of intriguing detail, and eminently teachable.”?—Ray Casman, New Hibernia Review “The most important monograph on Irish history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be published in recent years.”—Matthew Kelly, English Historical Review “A strikingly ambitious work . . . . Elegantly constructed, lucidly written and inspired, and displaying an inexhaustible capacity for research”—Ciarán Brady, History IRELAND “A closely argued, meticulously detailed and rich analysis . . . . providing such innovative treatment of a wide array of sources, his work will resonate with the concerns of many cultural and historical geographers working on social memory in quite different geographical settings and historical contexts.”—Yvonne Whelan, Journal of Historical Geography

Consideration of the Cato Street Conspiracy sheds new light of the British and Irish radical traditions, how they are different from one another, but also the similarities between the two from the eighteenth century until the late twentieth century.

On Monday 19 September 1803, the most significant trial in the history of Ireland took place in Dublin. At the dock stood a twenty-five year old former Trinity College student and doctor’s son. His name was Robert Emmet and he was standing trial for heading a rebellion on 23 July 1803. The iconic power of Robert Emmet in Irish history cannot be overstated. Emmet looms large in narratives of the past, yet the rebellion, which he led, remains to be fully contextualized. Patterson’s book repairs this omission and explains the complex of politicization and revolutionary activity extending into the 1800’s. He details the radicalisation of the grass roots, their para-militarism and engagement in secret societies. Drawing on an intriguing range of sources, Patterson offers a comprehensive insight into a relatively neglected period of history. This work is of particular significance to undergraduate and post-graduate students and lecturers of Irish history.

All of the men involved at the heart of the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820 either had been friends and followers of the radical agitator Thomas Spence (1750–1814) or became members of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists formed after his death to propagate his ideas. Malcolm Chase has claimed that ‘Cato Street is fully intelligible only within the Spencean context’.¹ This chapter, therefore, examines the attitude of Thomas Spence and his followers to the use of violence for political ends. It demonstrates that Spence and the Spenceans pinned their hopes for realising the Plan on revolts flaring up ‘abroad