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McCay, Kelly Matthew, b. 1978 (SC 1844)
Full text linkFinding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 1844. Letters from students at Muhlenberg North High School, Greenville, Kentucky, as well as e-mails, greeting cards, etc. sent to Kelly Matthew McCay while he served with the U.S. Army in Iraq
Quartz and Feldspar: Dartmoor - A British Landscape in Modern Times
No full textGranite, a tough composite of quartz, feldspar and mica, is the stuff of Dartmoor, the most formidable of the five granite bosses punctuating Britain’s southwest peninsula. A miserable place of rain and bog or a sunny upland of exquisite natural beauty, here the elements are raw, the sky huge and nature seems ascendant.
But it is no less a place made by human beings. Stone circles, crosses, dwellings and boundaries speak of the ancient, medieval and modern people that extracted a living from the moorscape and created what it is today. Where convicts are incarcerated, backpackers roam freely; where commoners graze livestock, the army is trained; where the National Park Authority exercises control, the Duchy of Cornwall claims ownership. And Dartmoor remains a place that provides. Reservoirs hold the water drunk by local people. China clay is extracted from its mineral reserves. Not long ago granite was quarried from its hillsides.
What is modern Dartmoor and what should it be? Did druids officiate here? Can the bog be drained and crops grown? Is it the place for a prison? And what of its people’s future, and the fate of its ponies, cows and sheep? For three hundred years such questions have been asked of the moor. Quartz and Feldspar does not so much provide answers as unearth those who did and the arguments they provoked
'Parnell's Old Brigade': the Redmondite-Fenian nexus in the 1890s
No full textThe relationship between constitutional and advanced or physical-force nationalism in nineteenth-century Ireland was always tense and intimate. Both traditions professed to repudiate the stated aims and strategies of the other, while at the same time often co-operating across the apparent ideological and organisational divides. The Fenians worked with Isaac Butt’s early home rule movement, while the New Departures of the late 1870s facilitated I.R.B. involvement in the Land League and the home rule movement, proving crucial to the emergent leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. Although this ideological flexibility was often motivated by a self-interested desire to be associated with influential organisations and personalities, it also arose from the realisation that the ideal strategy was currently inappropriate. The essence of the New Departure lay in allowing physical-force men to join the agrarian agitation of the Land League on the understanding that this did not compromise their separatist ideals. Consequently, the self-identification of separatists at the time of the 1916 rising as belonging to an immemorial tradition, consecrated by the blood of martyrs, needs to be set against both the contingency of political engagement and the lack of precision as to the form of state a separate Ireland might take
Subjects or aliens?
No full textMy grandmother lives in sheltered accommodation in the London borough of Lambeth. In the late 1940s she and my grandfather, newly wed, migrated to London from Sligo, a small county town on Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard. On her last visit to Sligo in 1995, as the Celtic Tiger was beginning to stir, she was depressed by what she saw. The new realities didn’t fit her sense of the town, an amalgam of memories, some from her childhood, others from the late 1960s, when she would holiday there with my grandfather and their three children. It was only on her final visit that she registered the cumulative effect of the steady drip drip drip of deaths she had followed in the back pages of the Sligo Champion. Now she no longer recognises the names recorded there and disapproves of the ‘vagary’ that otherwise fills the Champion’s pages. When, a few years ago, she read that Sligo was bidding for city status, she wrote to the Irish prime minister demanding that a stop be put to this nonsense. Those blackguards were getting too big for their boots
The politics of Protestant street preaching in 1890s Ireland
No full textDuring the 1890s evangelical Protestants took to preaching on the streets in southern Irish towns and cities. They provoked an angry response, with large Catholic crowds gathering to protest at their activities. This created a difficult situation for the authorities. Obliged, on the one hand, to protect the rights and liberties of the preachers, they also looked to nurture behaviour appropriate to the sectarian realities in Ireland. At stake was the extent to which Ireland could be treated as an undifferentiated part of the United Kingdom, with W. E. H. Lecky increasingly recognizing the need for a different legal basis in Ireland. These events formed part of the wider evolution of ‘constructive unionism’. More broadly, respectable Irish Protestant and Catholic disapproval of preachers and the ‘mob’ revealed the way in which class attitudes cut across sectarian identities, suggesting that the political dividends paid the wider unionist movement by this exposure of the apparent realities of ‘Rome rule’ were little valued in the locale. Similarly, interventions by home rule politicians reinforced the sense that conciliating British public opinion was a central concern. Here was an example of how locally orientated sectarianism helped shape national political agendas
Finding Poland: from Tavistock to Hruzdowa and back again
No full textFollowing the partitioning of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, Matthew Kelly's great grandmother and her two daughters were deported to the East. Thus began an extraordinary ordeal that took them, and many thousands like them, on a journey stretching from Siberia to Pakistan, and beyond
Irish Nationalist opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s
No full textIreland's historical position within the British Empire has become a contentious issue for historians, literary critics and commentators. The debate has generated heated scholarly exchanges, exposing the fault-lines that run through Irish studies. At one end of the spectrum of opinion, Terry Eagleton has argued that ‘there are ... two kinds of invisibility: one which arises from absence, and the other from over-obtrusive presence’. This over-obtrusive presence, for Eagleton, is the colonial relationship between Britain, the colonial power, and Ireland, the colony, a relationship which makes it appropriate to consider Ireland's experiences as similar to non-European colonies. Eagleton implies that so obviously did Ireland comprise a colonized society of this sort that to argue otherwise must reflect a wider agenda. Seamus Deane is less elliptical, relating the dispute directly to the ideologies and mentalités underpinning the way Irish history is written. ‘The rhetoric of [historical] revisionism’, he asserts, ‘obviously derives from the rhetoric of colonialism and imperialism’. Whether this is symptomatic of historians’ unreflexiveness, of their incapacity to develop a consciousness of the discourses within which they write, or whether their innate conservatism renders them collaborators with colonialism, is not entirely clear
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