Category Archives: Arts & Culture

New murals at St. Pat’s, NYC, depict USA immigrants, Knock

Leave a reply

New murals depicting the 19th century arrival of Irish and other immigrants to America will be dedicated Sunday, Sept. 21, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. The 12-panel installation by the Brooklyn-based artist Adam Cvijanovi also includes a representation of the 1879 Marian apparition at Knock, County Mayo.

“It’s a celebration of a city that has been built by immigrants and where immigrants have been welcomed,” Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, retiring archbishop of New York, told the New York Times. He led a 2015 pilgrimage to Knock, and in 2017 presided over the reburial of one of the 15 witnesses, an Irish immigrant laborer in New York.

I’ve requested authorized images of the murals from the Cathedral and will update the post if they are provided. Meanwhile, to honor the new artwork and mark “Half-Way to St. Patrick’s Day,” I reprise these earlier posts:

What you need to know about Knock’s vision visitors, 2017

My pilgrimages to St. Patrick’s churches, 2022

The new murals are the first major art commission in the cathedral since bronze doors were installed at the Fifth Avenue entrance in 1949. Shamrock detail from the doors.

The twin spires at night, October 2018.

The ‘Irish Literary Supplement’ says slán

Leave a reply

This summer, Robert G. Lowery published the final issue of the Irish Literary Supplement, a biannual journal that provided readers approximately 2,000 reviews since 1982.

“I’m grateful to all those reviewers and editors who were with me from the start, and those who joined the journey at stops along the way,” the editor and publisher wrote on the American Conference of Irish Studies (ACIS) Facebook page.

Lowery’s message generated more than three dozen supportive comments and nearly 100 positive emoji reactions as of the date this story was published.

“You have rendered the world of Irish Studies, indeed anyone interested in this country, its diaspora and its rich cultural history, a dedicated and generous service,” wrote Piaras Mac Éinrí, lecturer in Migration Studies and Geography at University College Cork.

Lowery, 84, has been a member of ACIS since 1975. He is the author of six books on Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey (1880-1964). In the 1970s, Lowery was founder and editor of the journal The Sean O’Casey Review. Simultaneously, he was editor of the ACIS Newsletter for 10 years and the Irish Arts Center (New York City) magazine Ais-Eiri for five years. He organized numerous conferences and centenary celebrations about Casey, and in 1986 delivered his extensive archive of O’Casey memorabilia to the Boston College Library.

The final issue of the ILS.

For most of its run the ILS was a cooperative venture between Lowery, ACIS, which provided mailing labels of its membership, and the Irish Studies program at Boston College, which provided sponsorship. Circulation fluctuated depending on ACIS membership, while at peak about 400 libraries subscribed to the journal.

“Before ILS, which most people can’t remember, there were very few outlets for book reviews on Irish subjects,” Lowery wrote in reply to my outreach. “The Times Literary Supplement would have one issue per year where Irish books filled the pages. And of course, the Irish newspapers carried book reviews, but this was before the internet and the only way to get Irish papers was at a few newsstands in New York City, Boston, and maybe Washington, D.C.

Before the internet … Today book publishers routinely bypass independent reviewers to promote their titles through web pages, email lists, and social media feeds. It seems to me that ILS readers and the Irish Studies scholars who wrote the reviews are shortchanged by these newer marketing strategies.

“Bob listened to many of us try out our work, which meant that he also had a sense of who might be able to review works that crossed his desk,” Timothy G. McMahon, Ph.D., associate professor of Modern Irish and British Empire History at Marquette University, Milwaukee, and a past ACIS president, wrote in an email. “A lot of us, therefore, got experience reviewing in the pages of the ILS, including learning how to deal with a tough-minded editor who cast a critical eye over the text.”

The final issue of ILS featured 21 reviews of books from 13 U.S., U.K., and Irish publishers, with a display advertisement from Wake Forest University Press, a supporter of the journal for decades. “I think it’s a strong ending,” Lowery wrote.

So what’s next?

Is there a future for the ILS?

Lowery, who owns the title through a Long Island, N.Y., entity called Irish Studies, said he hopes “an enterprising scholar” will pick up where has left off.

“The key to keeping such a publication going is to get the endorsement of ACIS,” he continued. “If you’re going digital, you can simply post the paper on the ACIS Facebook site; but I don’t know how you will fund it. It is too expensive to print, and print is somewhat passe anyway. When I started in 1982, first class postage for a 20-page paper to Ireland and England was 60 cents. Today, it’s $6.00. There is no 2nd or 3rd class postage.”

The endeavor also requires “a good strong Irish editor,” Lowery added. “I was lucky to have them.”

I reached out to ACIS and Boston College. I welcome members of the Irish Studies community to provide their thoughts about continuing the ILS in some format.

A trio of Irish miscellany from May

Here are three unrelated items about Ireland during the merry, merry month:

  • UCC exhibit

I was delighted to contribute some research and materials to “The Irish Revolution in the African American Press” exhibition at University College Cork. It is focused on how the US black press covered three key events:

  • De Valera’s tour of America (1919–20)
  • MacSwiney’s hunger strike death (1920)
  • The Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921-22)

Dr. Jemima Hodgkinson, a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow specializing in the history of anti-slavery and anti-colonial movements, curated the exhibit. It is open until July 14 at the Boole Library, ground floor.

  • Irish couture 

The dress at the left forefront was created by Dublin designer Jennifer Rothwell for Irish Ambassador to the United States Geraldine Byrne Nason. It was featured in the “Fashioning Power, Fashioning Peace” Exhibition and Gala at the President Woodrow Wilson House in Washington, D.C. Former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the honoree of the annual fundraiser. The silk dress is a tribute to St. Brigid, whose reflected image can be seen extending from each shoulder. To the right are pieces from Singapore and Chez Republic. This display was in the library of the house where Wilson–seen in the portrait–lived from the end of his presidency in March 1921 until his death in February 1924. I work at the museum as a part-time guide. 

  • Times letter

Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote about the numerical decline and lay distrust of the priesthood. He suggested Ireland has become “mentally ditched from Catholic history as a lost cause that is best forgotten.” My letter to the Times editor disagreed.

Irish performance poet Paul Durcan is dead at 80

Irish poet Paul Durcan has died in Dublin. He was 80. His “contribution to the performed poem was of enormous importance to the appreciation of poetry in Ireland,” Irish President Michael D. Higgins said.

In his introduction to the poet’s 80th birthday collection, 80 at 80, Irish writer Colm Tóibín said Durcan’s “voice as he read from his work and spoke about poetry could be both deadpan and dead serious; it could also be wildly comic and brilliantly indignant.” Tobin continued:

I loved the undercurrent of anarchy playing against moral seriousness and I began to go to his readings. These were extraordinary performances where many parts were acted out, and where the comedy was undermined by anger sometimes, or pure melancholy, or raw quirkiness, or a sympathy for pain or loss or loneliness.

Paul Durcan

My wife and I attended a Durcan reading at the 2012 Listowel Writers’ Week, the year he published Praise in Which I Live and Move and Have my Being. The reading occurred in a ballroom at the historic Listowel Arms Hotel on the town’s main square. Durcan sat with his back to a large bank of windows, beyond which the lovely River Feale shimmered in the long, lingering dusk of the approaching summer solstice.

Durcan read from his new collection, including “On the First Day of June,” which happened to be the date of the performance. He exclaimed:

I was walking behind Junior Daly’s coffin
Up a narrow winding terraced street
In Cork city in the rain on the first day of June …

The poem describes how Daly and his friend John Moriarty had died 12 minutes apart, each from “the same Rottweiler of cancer,” and now their spirts stood together watching the mourners inside Cork city’s North Cathedral. “Christ Jesus, Junior, wouldn’t you want to lift up their poor heads in your hands like new baby potatoes and demonstrate them to the world,” Moriarty says. The poem concludes:

… Outside in the streets and the meadows
In Cork and Kerry
On the first day of June on the island of Ireland
Through the black rain the sun shown.

This poem about the swiftness of life and the suddenness of death still brings a shudder of emotion to me, a watering of the eye. It is not Durcan’s best poem; he did not selected it for 80 at 80. But the delightful serendipity of hearing Durcan read the poem on the date of its title, in such a lovely setting, made this one of my favorite moments in Ireland. It remains so seven visits and 13 years later.

After Durcan’s performance I stood in line for nearly 30 minutes to have the poet sign–and date–a copy of his new volume, which I purchased for my wife. I was anxious to join her and some dear cousins in the hotel bar. But I am grateful that my patience prevailed.  

Remembering CUA library donor John K. Mullen of Galway

John Kernan Mullen of Ballinasloe, County Galway, helped to fund the Catholic University of America (CUA) library that bears his name. The cornerstone was laid April 25, 1925, on the Washington, D.C., campus.

Mullen emigrated to America in 1847, when he was nine. “He began working in a flour mill in Oriskany Falls, N.Y.,” according to a CUA profile. “At 20, Mullen went West, leasing a flour mill in Denver, Colo., and soon after buying several more mills. By 1911 he had built the first grain elevator in the state, established the Colorado Milling and Elevator Company, and operated 91 elevators, warehouses and mills in Colorado, Kansas, Utah and Oregon.”

He became a millionaire.

In 1924, Mullen pledged $500,000 to CUA to build a library, which opened as the John K. Mullen of Denver Memorial Library in September 1928. Since then the library has been open to the public. My work has benefited from access to the Mullen Library and CUA’s Special Collections, which are held in a different building. See the library’s online centenary exhibition.

There is no doubt of Mullen’s business success and generous philanthropy, especially to the Catholic church. He might have been motivated by having escaped the Great Famine.

His political views about Ireland’s struggle for independence are more of a mystery. He surely knew that Rev. Thomas J. Shahan, CUA’s rector from 1909 to 1928, had been an ardent Irish nationalist and national vice president of the Friends of Irish Freedom during the country’s revolutionary years. Exiled Fenian John Devoy attended the 1925 cornerstone ceremony. Coverage of the event in his Gaelic American newspaper mentioned only Mullen’s financial gift.[1]”Cardinal Lays Cornerstone Of Library, Gaelic American, May 2, 1925.

Mullen died in August 1929 in Denver. US Catholic newspapers and secular press obituaries also were silent as to Mullen’s views about his homeland. The digital Irish Newspaper Archive contains no coverage of his death or funding the library.

Bust of John K. Mullen on the main stairway landing between the library’s lobby and second floor.

This plaque is located inside the library’s front door.

References

References
↑1 ”Cardinal Lays Cornerstone Of Library, Gaelic American, May 2, 1925.

New(ish) Dublin museum focuses on Irish literature

DUBLIN–The Dublin Writers Museum opened in 1991 inside an 18th-century Georgian townhouse at 18 Parnell Square. It was dedicated to the county’s literary giants, including Samuel Beckett,  Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, George Bernard Shaw, Bram Stoker,  Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and others. Sure, Trinity College on the south side of the Liffey held the globally famous Book of Kells, but DWM displayed Joyce’s typewriter, Beckett’s telephone, and Behan’s press credentials.

The COVID 19 pandemic closed the museum in March 2020. Even before then, complaints had begun to mount that it did not feature enough women authors or living writers. An assessment commissioned by Fáilte Ireland, the national tourism development agency, concluded later in 2020 that DWM “no longer meets the expectation of the contemporary museum visitor in terms of accessibility, presentation and interpretation.” It never reopened.

Plaque outside Newman House.

Simultaneously, discussions had been taking place since 2010 between the National Library of Ireland and University College Dublin for a creative alliance between their two unique assets – NLI’s Joyce collection and UCD’s historic Newman House property at 86 St. Stephen’s Green. Built in 1765 as a private residence, it was transformed in 1854 into the  Catholic University of Ireland , precursor of UCD, under the rectorship of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Joyce studied there from 1899 to 1902.

A panel in the new museum recalls the old museum.

In September 2019, Newman House opened as the Museum of Literature Ireland (or MoLI–after the Joyce character Molly Bloom. This was six months before COVID closed the DWM and the rest of Dublin. Now that it has survived the pandemic, MoLI features “dynamic, immersive exhibitions that tell the story of Ireland’s literary heritage from our earliest storytelling traditions to our celebrated contemporary writers.” One room of the new museum is dedicated to the DWM, including the artifacts mentioned above. Other materials that are not on display have become part of the MoLI’s archives.

In March, MoLI named David Cleary as its new director and CEO. He had been director of sales & operations at EPIC, The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin’s Dockside district. MoLI receives government and private sector support.

In addition to its displays, MoLI offers a gift shop and cafe, including outdoor seating in a lovely courtyard. The courtyard provides access to Iveagh Gardens, described here as “among the finest, but least known, of Dublin’s parks and gardens.” Or, in the words of a popular Irish woman writer affixed to the entrance gate:

The gate between the Museum of Literature Ireland courtyard and the Iveagh Gardens.

When a US magazine devoted a full issue to Ireland

Thirty-five months after the January 1919 opening of the Irish separatist parliament, and a week before the December 1921 announcement of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the New York-based Survey Graphic published a special issue devoted to Ireland. “Here for the first time in an American national magazine will be presented a complete survey of the Irish situation as it is today, as well as the plans which many of the prominent Irish thinkers have in mind for the Ireland of tomorrow,” the periodical’s business manager, John Kenderdine, wrote to Irish American activist Frank P. Walsh.[1]Kenderdine to Walsh, Nov. 15, 1921, in Walsh papers, New York Public Library.

Kenderdine offered to discount the magazine’s regular newsstand price of 30 cents per copy by a third to a half, depending on how many extra copies were ordered. He provided Walsh with “rough proofs of the content” subject to final layout and other editorial adjustments.

Walsh, chairman of the American Commission on Irish Independence, replied two days later from his Washington, D.C. office: “I think the idea most timely and the edition a very fine one.” He promised to alert the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic, which Eamon de Valera founded a year earlier in a split with the Friends of Irish Freedom. Walsh said he also would notify Irish leaders but told Kenderdine that he had no role in “the distribution of literature of this character.”[2]Walsh to Kenderdine, Nov. 17, 1921, Walsh papers.

(Continues below image)

Cover of the November 1921 issue of The Survey.

The cover of the magazine posed the question: “What Would the Irish Do With Ireland?” The answers were supplied over 68 pages by nearly a score of writers and artists in the form of essays, poems, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Each name in this alphabetical list of contributors is linked to their page in the issue:

The Survey was first published in 1909 as a journal for social workers and a broader audience of concerned citizens. Paul Underwood Kellogg, the editor, had spent the previous few years leading a groundbreaking investigation of “life and labor” in the Pittsburgh steel district. The Survey Graphic emerged from a series of reconstruction-themed issues published during and after the First World War. These focused on industrial relations, health, education, international relations, housing, race relations, consumer education, and related fields.[3]University of Minnesota Archival Collection Guides, Social Welfare History Archives, Survey Associates records, SW0001.

By 1921, the magazine’s influence among progressive thinkers probably surpassed its reported nationwide circulation of about 13,700 copies. But it hardly competed with giants of the day such as Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, with 498,000 circulation, or McClure’s monthly, with 440,000.[4]N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual & Directory (Philadelphia, N.W. Ayer & Son’s, 1921). A few mainstream newspapers republished some of Survey Graphic’s guest essays on their opinion pages. One editorial endorsement said the Irish issue was “well worth the perusal of every person interested in the Irish cause.[5]Editorial in The Catholic Bulletin, St. Paul, Minn., Dec. 31, 1921.

In an overly optimistic and ultimately inaccurate editorial, Survey Graphic concluded the answer to the question it posed on the issue’s cover–“What would the Irish do with Ireland?–was that the Irish would give the world a new form of “rural civilization” and fraternity. It continued:

This is one of the most encouraging signs of the times—development of rural communities on a cooperative basis; each community to have so far as possible its own general store for supplies of common need; each community to manufacture what it can do advantageously with a common mill, creamery, bacon factory, electric plant, buying the commodities that can not be supplied at home and selling its products; each community to establish schools, recreation halls and libraries, organize community pageants and games; each community to have its town council where common problems and new plans may be discussed. … The old and the very young nations are struggling in Europe for their rights. England by its bloodless revolution gave to the world a new conception of liberty, France by the great revolution, equality. Ireland has the qualifications to give us something as precious: fraternity.

It did not work work out that way. Political partition and sectarianism were major problems in Ireland for most the twentieth century. Agricultural cooperatives were replaced by corporate agriculture. Ireland retains its beautiful countryside, but most of its people live in urban districts, working in an economy that was unimaginable in 1921.

Advertisement in The New Republic, Dec. 7, 1921.

References

References
↑1 Kenderdine to Walsh, Nov. 15, 1921, in Walsh papers, New York Public Library.
↑2 Walsh to Kenderdine, Nov. 17, 1921, Walsh papers.
↑3 University of Minnesota Archival Collection Guides, Social Welfare History Archives, Survey Associates records, SW0001.
↑4 N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual & Directory (Philadelphia, N.W. Ayer & Son’s, 1921).
↑5 Editorial in The Catholic Bulletin, St. Paul, Minn., Dec. 31, 1921.

Best of the blog, 2024

It’s been a good year. My work included two public presentations, publication of my first entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, and a trip to Ireland. I reviewed important archival collections at University College Dublin and the New York Public Library. I donated archival material to the University of Galway. The site surpassed its 1,000th post on the way to this 12th annual roundup of the year’s news and content.

In April I presented “The American Press and the Irish Revolution” at the American Irish Historical Society in New York City. The one-hour talk highlighted my ongoing research on this topic. In October I presented my paper, “Ireland’s ‘Bloody Sundays’ and The Pittsburgh Catholic, 1920 & 1972,” at the American Journalism Historians Association’s annual conference in Pittsburgh, my native city. This paper and my other work are found in the American Reporting of Irish Independence section.

The DIB published my entry on Michael Joseph O’Brien. The Irish Catholic (Dublin) published my essay on “The ever-changing American Irish.” I have two longform pieces queued for 2025 publication in scholarly journals. One is a non-Irish subject. Detail once published.

1953 letter & shamrocks.

During my November trip to Ireland I donated some 50 family letters to Imicre, The Kerby A. Miller Collection, Irish Emigrant Letters and Memoirs from North America at the University of Galway. The database of scanned and transcribed letters went online in March 2024.

The letters I donated are primary between a daughter of my Kerry-born maternal grandparents (my aunt) and several cousins in Ireland. They are dated from the 1970s and 1980s. A few older letters between other correspondents are dated from January 1921 through St. Patrick’s Day 1953. I have been told the material will be uploaded to the public database sometime in 2025.

More highlights:

–Most popular post of the year: United Ireland in 2024? Fiction and fact

–Voters in the Republic of Ireland this year decided a constitutional referendum as well as local and European Union elections. The electorate there and in Northern Ireland also decided national elections with historical and contemporary implications. See:

–I toured Flanders fields in Belgium, including the Island of Ireland Peace Park (Photo below), and heard Fergal Keane “On war reporting and trauma, then and now” at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.

–I have visited more than two dozen St. Patrick’s churches in four countries. This year I finally walked inside the Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. (Photo below)

–Guest posts: Mark Bulik contributed an excerpt from his book, Ambush at Central Park: When the IRA Came to New York; Felix Larkin provided John Bruton (1947-2024), an appreciation.

***

My work often requires the assistance of librarians and archivists. Special thanks to the staff at the New York Public Library for their assistance in reviewing the Maloney collection of Irish historical papers and Frank P. Walsh papers; and at UCD with the Eamon de Valera papers and Desmond FitzGerald papers. Here in DC, I am grateful for the personal assistance and access to materials at the Library of Congress, Georgetown University Library, and Catholic University of American Library. This year I also received virtual help from the Kansas City (Mo.) Public Library; Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse (N.Y.) University; the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota; and Iona University in New Rochelle, N.Y.

I am grateful to all visitors to this site, especially my email subscribers. Wishing happy holidays to all my readers.

Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Round tower at Island of Ireland Peace Park in Belgium.

Some Irish books for holiday gift giving, or ‘yourshelf’

A Christmas tree sprouted in the lobby of my Dublin hotel during a mid-November visit to the Irish capital. In the U.S., the arrival of the Thanksgiving signals the start of the year-end holidays. Since books are a great gift to give others–or ourselves–below I provide details of a dozen titles that have found their way to my reading chair or caught my attention in the press this year. There is an emphasis on books that explore aspects of the Irish in America, or journalism. Descriptions are taken from publisher promotions and modified, as appropriate, by my own assessments. Books are listed in alphabetical order by author’s surname. Remember to support your local bookseller. Enjoy. MH

  • Atlas series, multiple editors, Atlas of the Irish Civil War. [Cork University Press, 2024] This title joins Atlas of the Great Irish Famine 1845-52, published in 2012, and Atlas of the Irish Revolution, 2017. With contributions from over 90 scholars, this book is a key resource for historians or casual readers and a must-mention for this list.
  • Mark Bulik, Ambush at Central Park: When the IRA Came to New York. [Fordham, 2023] The author provided this Guest Post excerpt in January.
  • Mary Cogan, Moments of Reflection, Mindful Thoughts and Photographs. [Crannsilini Publishing, 2024.] Mary publishes the popular Listowel Connection website. Her book is not available online, but she welcomes email at listowelconnection@gmail.com. “We’ll sort something out,” she told me.
  • Gessica Cosi, Reshaping’ Atlantic Connections: Ireland and Irish America 1917-1921. [Edward Everett Root, 2024] Uses U.S.-born Irish leader Eamon de Valera’s June 1919 to December 1920 tour of America to explore the varieties of Irish American identities and nationalist ideologies. Also probes the larger question of what it meant to be “ethnic” in the U.S. during and after its entry into the Great War.
  • Seán Creagh, The Wolfhounds of Irish-American Nationalism: A History of Clan na Gael, 1867-Present. [Peter Lang, 2023] Claims to be “the first book covering the entire history of Clan na Gael,” the U.S.-based revolutionary group supporting Irish independence and unification since the mid-19th century. The author also asserts there is “an academic bias in Ireland against the study and recognition of groups like Clan na Gael in the overall struggle for Irish independence.” Hmm. Kudos for Creagh’s effort, but his writing is awkward and the lack of an index reduces the book’s usefulness.  
  • Hasia R. Diner, Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America. [St. Martin Press, 2024] Despite contrary popular belief, Diner insists the prevailing relationships between Jewish and Irish Americans were overwhelmingly cooperative, and the two groups were dependent upon one another to secure stable and upwardly mobile lives in their new home.
  • Myles Dungan, Land Is All That Matters: The Struggle That Shaped Irish History [Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024] Examines two hundred years of agrarian conflict from the famine of 1741 to the eve of World War Two. Some great stuff for those of us with an interest in this niche topic, but at over 600 pages, this tome is probably not for casual readers. I found Dungan’s overuse of French and Latin phrases annoying.   
  • Diarmaid Ferriter, The Revelation of Ireland, 1995-2020, [Profile Books, 2024] In what might be considered a sequel or addendum to The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, his 2005 overview, Ferriter explores the quarter century of developments on the island from the eve of the Good Friday Agreement to COVID.
  • Eamonn Mallie, Eyewitness to War & Peace. [Merrion Press, 2024] The Northern Ireland journalist details his experiences of covering the Troubles, from street violence to exclusive interviews with key figures such as Gerry Adams, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, John Hume, Ian Paisley, and Margaret Thatcher.
  • Timothy J. Meagher, Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People From Roanoke to JFK [Yale University Press, 2023] Reveals how Irish American identity was forged, how it has transformed, and how it has held lasting influence on American culture. See my Irish Catholic essay on this book and William V. Shannon’s The American Irish, a foundational study of Irish America from 1963.
  • Thomas J. Rowland, Patriotism is a Catholic Virtue: Irish-American Catholics and the Church in the Era of the Great War, 1900-1918. [The Catholic University of America Press, 2023] How Hibernian Romanists combated U.S. nativists’ religious and social attacks, proved themselves as loyal Americans during the First World War, and directed the course of Irish American nationalism in the cause of their motherland’s fight for freedom. Rowland provides some good background details about Irish influence on the U.S. Catholic press.
  • David Tereshchuk, A Question of Paternity, My Life as an Unaffiliated Reporter. [Envelope Books, 2024] I attended a conversation between Tereshchuk and Irish activist and journalist Don Mullan in September at the American Irish Historical Society in New York. They shared their experiences of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, which Tereshchuk covered as a broadcast journalist. Tereshchuk revisits the event and other aspects of his life beyond Ireland in this memoir.

    Some of the books listed above.

Remembering Dorothea Lange’s ‘Irish Country People’

Seventy years ago this month American photographer Dorothea Lange arrived in County Clare and pointed her camera toward the locals. Six months later, at St. Patrick’s Day, Life magazine advertised her work as “12 pages of beautiful and sensitive pictures” that put readers “face to face with the rural folk of Ireland.”[1]From advertisement for the March 21, 1955, issue, as featured in the New York Daily News, March 17, 1955. The spread included about two dozen black-and-white images from among Lange’s more than 2,400 negatives.

Then 59, Lange was accompanied by her 29-year-old son, the writer Daniel Dixon, who provided the accompanying text and photo captions. They visited Ennis, Ennistymon, Tubber, Sixmilebridge, and other locations.

Opening page of Lange’s 1955 Life photo feature on Ireland.

“The forefathers of the Irish around the world who are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day looked very much like the smiling lad above,” the feature began. “Here as always the families worship, work stubborn land, bend to bitter winds together, and are quietly content. His people live to the ancient Irish ways, and a visitor finds them, as the following pages show, humorous, direct and generous–good ancestors to have.”

View Lange’s “Irish Country People” photo essay, and the the entire March 21, 1955, issue with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

Lange conceived and pitched her idea to Life after reading The Irish Countryman by the American anthropologist Conrad M. Arensberg. The 1937 book emerged from his Harvard doctoral dissertation.

“What made it an instant classic … was not Dr. Arensberg’s specific observations on Irish society but the prescriptions he laid down for making and interpreting those observations with scientific precision,” the New York Times reported in his obituary. “The study became a model for other community studies, and a demanding model it was, requiring that researchers study a target culture from the inside, making meticulous notes on everything they saw, heard or experienced.”[2]”Conrad Arensberg, 86, Dies; Hands-On Anthropologist”, New York Times, Feb. 16, 1997.

By coincidence, Paris-based American anthropologist Robert Cresswell arrived in Ireland soon after Lange’s images were published in Life to conduct another analysis of Irish rural life, much like Arensberg. Cresswell’s work in and around Kinvara, County Galway, resulted in the 1969 study, Une Communauté Rurale de l’Irlande.[3]See “Ireland in the 1950s – Through the Lens of Robert Cresswell“, Roaringwater Journal, Feb. 23, 2020. His archive of more than 450 black and white photographs, nearly 100 Kodachrome slides, 16mm film footage, plus documents and notes, are held by the Kinvara Community Association.

Retrospective and revival

Lange is best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. A few months after her death in 1965, six more of her previously unseen Irish images were displayed in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first one-person retrospective by a female photographer at MoMA.[4]See “1950s Ireland“, Roaringwater Journal, Feb. 16, 2020.

Four decades after Lange’s visit to Clare, Irish author Gerry Mullins reviewed her negatives at the Oakland Museum of California. He returned to Clare determined to find people she had photographed, as he recalled recently for the Irish Independent.[5]See “Grieving family had no photo of young Mary…” Irish Independent, Sept. 14, 2024. Mullins’ 1996 book, Dorothea Lange’s Ireland, included an essay by Dixon. Photos To Send, a documentary film, followed in 2001.

Ireland has long beguiled photographers, both domestic and foreign; from the late 19th and early 20th century black-and-white images of the Lawrence Studio’s Robert French to the 1913 work of the French women Madeleine Mignon-Alba and Marguerite Mespoulet. The pair produced what are believed to be the first color images of the country.[6]See my post, “Irish history movie ideas: The Colors of Ireland“, June 21, 2020.  In 1975, the American photographer Jill Uris joined her author husband, Leon, to produce Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, with more than 300 photos, about a third in color. His best-selling novel Trinity was published the following year. Her follow-up photo book, Ireland Revisited, appeared in 1982.

I welcome details of other photojournalism projects in Ireland, especially by Americans.

Another page of Lange’s 1955 Life photo feature on Ireland.

References

References
↑1 From advertisement for the March 21, 1955, issue, as featured in the New York Daily News, March 17, 1955.
↑2 ”Conrad Arensberg, 86, Dies; Hands-On Anthropologist”, New York Times, Feb. 16, 1997.
↑3 See “Ireland in the 1950s – Through the Lens of Robert Cresswell“, Roaringwater Journal, Feb. 23, 2020.
↑4 See “1950s Ireland“, Roaringwater Journal, Feb. 16, 2020.
↑5 See “Grieving family had no photo of young Mary…” Irish Independent, Sept. 14, 2024.
↑6 See my post, “Irish history movie ideas: The Colors of Ireland“, June 21, 2020.