Martin Meenagh blog

I first came across the 'complaint of Ceatinn' from 1633 in Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland . It is a defiant response to English colonialism and the state of Ireland during one of our many popular catastrophes and episodes of near extinction. Keating lays out the reasons why the Irish historian should remember his people, and notes the tension between the path of an elitist--he has, after all, seen books and earned credibility that others have not--and the wisdom and culture of the people who produced him. It's in my commonplace book, which someday I should place online, but I wanted more people to see it; Oir ataim asoda, agus drong diobh-san og; do chonnairc me agus tuigim primh-leabhair an tseanchusa, agus ni facadarsan iad, agus da bhfacdis, ni tuigfidhe leo iad. Ni ar fhuath nar ar ghradh droinge ar bioth seach a cheile, na ar fhuraileamh aon duine, na do shuil re socha d’fhail uaidh, chuireas romhan stair nah Eireann do schriobh, ach de bhri gur mheasas nar bh’...

‘Reconstruction’ is a passive indicative term referring to several things. It talks to the reconstruction of the relationship between the States which had joined the Confederacy and the Federal Government after the defeat of the Confederacy, and as such can be divided into presidential, congressional, and judicial forms. It also talks to the reconstruction of the relationship between Americans of African descent in the Southern States, white Southerners, and other Americans too. The former point is relatively easy to resolve. One cannot use President Lincoln’s policy whilst the war was ongoing to define whether it succeeded or failed. Lincoln faced two pressures; one, to reconstruct Louisianan government, and secondly, by example and policy, to undermine the Southern will to fight on. As with many Lincoln policies, his ideas on reconstruction were in a state marked by ambiguity and evolution, and he was assassinated before he could pronounce on what he wanted, though he warmly endors...

I used to teach a course in Bath for an American undergraduate placement programme. It was a lovely programme, based in Nelson House, just down from the train station, and run by lovely people. An American university oversaw its courses. Over ten weeks or so, five to seven students and I would study the English, French, and American revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the counter-revolutions too. We would range from the barebones parliament to Napoleon, and from Tom Paine to the diggers. The courses were based around a source book, and I loved travelling down from Oxford or London to Bath, which I would hang around in at the end of the day before going back via the train bar and a good book. For many years, I taught the source book as a kind of chrestomathy—a collection of documents that illustrated key moments, each of which would help the students learn the language of liberty in the Atlantic world. Though I did of course introduce and refine religious ...

A friend of mine sent me a copy of Rosemary Wakeman's book on modern utopias. I had never realised that I grew up in large part in one, but, well, Corby is included and I still love it in my memory, so here is the extract. The full book itself is very interesting. “The new town of Corby in the English Midlands is a more detailed example of how designation as a new town played out. Corby was located near England’s largest supply of accessible ironstone and also the coalfields in Yorkshire and Durham. Mining rights and steel production were owned by the Stewarts and Lloyds Company. By the mid-1930s, the town was budding into a premier steelworks and steel tube-making centre. Thousands poured into the sleepy village of fifteen hundred souls, especially young Scottish workers from the Clyde Valley. Ten years later, in 1945, Corby was a boomtown of twelve thousand people, its steel mills churning out war materiel, including the steel tubes used in the cross-channel pipeline supplyin...