Surveys the history of the province from the plantations of the early seventeenth century to partition and the formation of Northern Ireland in the early 1920s, and onwards to the 'Troubles' of recent decades. A major contribution to the history of Ireland and to Ulster's contested place in the British and the wider world.

A comprehensive survey and analysis of the Presbyterian community in its important formative period. The Presbyterian community in Ulster was created by waves of immigration, massively reinforced in the 1690s as Scots fled successive poor harvests and famine, and by 1700 Presbyterians formed the largest Protestant community in the north of Ireland. This book is a comprehensive survey and analysis of the Presbyterian community in this important formative period. It shows how the Presbyterians formed a highly organised, self-confident community which exercised a rigorous discipline over its members and had a well-developed intellectual life. It considers the various social groups within the community, demonstrating how the always small aristocratic and gentry component dwindled andwas virtually extinct by the 1730s, the Presbyterians deriving their strength from the middling sorts - clergy, doctors, lawyers, merchants, traders and, in particular, successful farmers and those active in the rapidly growing linen trades - and among the laborious poor. It discusses how Presbyterians were part of the economically dynamic element of Irish society; how they took the lead in the emigration movement to the American colonies; and how they maintained links with Scotland and related to other communities, in Ireland and elsewhere. Later in the eighteenth century, the Presbyterian community went on to form the backbone of the Republican, separatist movement. ROBERT WHAN obtained his Ph.D. in History from Queen's University, Belfast.

Originally published in 1973, the emphasis of this study is on the Scottish settlers during the first quarter of the 17th Century. It shows that the ‘Plantation’, although a milestone in Ireland’s past is also of considerable importance in Scotland’s history. The society that produced Scottish settlers is examined and the reasons why they left their homeland analysed. The book explains what effect the Scottish migration had upon both Ireland and Scotland and assesses the extent to which James I was personally involved in the promotion of the ‘Plantation’ scheme.

The untold story of a group of Irish cities and their remarkable development before the age of industrialization A backward corner of Europe in 1600, Ireland was transformed during the following centuries. This was most evident in the rise of its cities, notably Dublin and Cork. David Dickson explores ten urban centers and their patterns of physical, social, and cultural evolution, relating this to the legacies of a violent past, and he reflects on their subsequent partial eclipse. Beautifully illustrated, this account reveals how the country’s cities were distinctive and—through the Irish diaspora—influential beyond Ireland’s shores.

This study explores the idea voiced by journalist Henry McDonald that the Protestant, Unionist and Loyalist tribes of Ulster are '...the least fashionable community in Western Europe'. A cast of contributors including prominent politicians, academics, journalists and artists explore the reasons informing public perceptions attached to this community.

This volume gathers over 40 world-class scholars to explore the dynamics that have shaped the Irish experience in America from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. From the early 1600s to the present, over 10 million Irish people emigrated to various points around the globe. Of them, more than six million settled in what we now call the United States of America. Some were emigrants, some were exiles, and some were refugees—but they all brought with them habits, ideas, and beliefs from Ireland, which played a role in shaping their new home. Organized chronologically, the chapters in this volume offer a cogent blend of historical perspectives from the pens of some of the world’s leading scholars. Each section explores multiple themes including gender, race, identity, class, work, religion, and politics. This book also offers essays that examine the literary and/or artistic production of each era. These studies investigate not only how Irish America saw itself or, in turn, was seen, but also how the historical moment influenced cultural representation. It demonstrates the ways in which Irish Americans have connected with other groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, and sets “Irish America” in the context of the global Irish diaspora. This book will be of value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as instructors and scholars interested in American History, Immigration History, Irish Studies, and Ethnic Studies more broadly.

Showcases the latest research on Scotland's rural economy and society. Early modern Scotland was predominantly rural. Agriculture was the main occupation of most people at the time, so what happened in the countryside was crucial: economically, socially and culturally. The essays collected here focus on the years between around 1500 and 1750. This period, although before the main era of agricultural "improvement" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was nevertheless far from static in terms of agrarian development. Specific topics addressed include everyday farming practices; investment; landlords, tenants and estate management; and the cultural context within which agriculture was "imagined". The disastrous famine of 1622-23 is analysed in detail. The volume is completed by a comprehensive survey of recent historiography, setting agricultural history in its broader context.

This collection features different perspectives on how digital tools are changing our understanding of language varieties, language contact, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and dialectology through the lens of different historical contexts. With a clear focus on English, chapters in the volume showcase a broad range of digital methods and approaches that can contribute to advancing the study of historical linguistics. Visualization tools and corpus-linguistic techniques are part of the methodologies included in the volume. The chapters present empirically based research and discuss theoretical aspects that emphasize how digitalization is changing our analysis of different domains of language, going from phonology to specific grammatical/morphosyntactic and lexical features, to discourse-related issues more broadly. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities.

Middle-Class Life in Victorian Belfast vividly reconstructs the social world of upper middle-class Belfast from c.1830 to 1890. Using extensive primary material, the book draws a rich portrait of Belfast's middle-class society, covering themes of civic activism, working lives, philanthropy, associational culture, evangelicalism, recreation, marriage and family life.

Forgetful Remembrance examines the paradoxes of what actually happens when communities persistently endeavour to forget inconvenient events. The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants—and in particular Presbyterians—repeatedly tried to repress over two centuries discomfiting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798. By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and more subtle rituals of remembrance that facilitated muted traditions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing. Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative references demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories have been concealed behind a veil of supposed oblivion.