Commemorating The Irish Famine

Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument explores the history of the 1840s Irish Famine in visual representation, commemoration and collective memory from the 19th century until the present, across Ireland and the nations of its diaspora, explaining why since the 1990s the Famine past has come to matter so much in our present.

Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory offers a new, concise interpretation of the history of the Irish in America. Author and distinguished professor Mary Kelly’s book is the first synthesized volume to track Ireland’s Great Famine within America’s immigrant history, and to consider the impact of the Famine on Irish ethnic identity between the mid-1800s and the end of the twentieth century. Moving beyond traditional emphases on Irish-American cornerstones such as church, party, and education, the book maps the Famine’s legacy over a century and a half of settlement and assimilation. This is the first attempt to contextualize a painful memory that has endured fitfully, and unquestionably, throughout Irish-American historical experience.

The papers collected here are a product of the second conference on Ireland's Great Hunger held at Quinnipiac University in 2005. This volume, focused on the theses of relief, representation, and remembrance, contains essays from a broad range of disciplines including works of history, literary criticism, anthropology, and art history.

This title examines an important historic event, the Irish Potato Famine. Readers will learn the history of Ireland leading up to the famine, key players and happenings during the famine, and the event's effect on society. Color photos and informative sidebars accompany easy-to-read, compelling text. Features include a timeline, facts, additional resources, web sites, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. Essential Events is a series in Essential Library, an imprint of ABDO Publishing Company. Grades 6-9.

'Commemorating the Irish Famine' explores the history of the 1840s Irish Famine in visual representation, commemoration and collective memory from the 19th century until the present, across Ireland and the nations of its diaspora, explaining why since the 1990s the Famine past has come to matter so much in our present.

The Irish Famine of 1846-50 was one of the great disasters of the nineteenth century, whose notoriety spreads as far as the mass emigration which followed it. Cormac O'Gráda's concise survey suggests that a proper understanding of the disaster requires an analysis of the Irish economy before the invasion of the potato-killing fungus, Phytophthora infestans, highlighting Irish poverty and the importance of the potato, but also finding signs of economic progress before the Famine. Despite the massive decline in availability of food, the huge death toll of one million (from a population of 8.5 million) was hardly inevitable; there are grounds for supporting the view that a less doctrinaire attitude to famine relief would have saved many lives. This book provides an up-to-date introduction by a leading expert to an event of major importance in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland and Britain.

Valone (director of freshman academic programs, Quinnipiac U.) and Kinealy (history, U. of Central Lancaster) present 17 chapters, penned by contributors from a wide range of disciplines including social sciences, the arts, and psychology, that examine issues of historical, personal, and family memory as they relate to the Great Hunger (or the Irish Famine). The first essays explore how the Hunger was silenced in contemporary political dialogue and Irish historical memory and how it caused silences, while later essays examine how it has been remembered and how it has been commemorated in public memory and educational establishments. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The Great Famine of 1845-52 was the most decisive event in the history of modern Ireland. In a country of eight million people, the Famine caused the death of approximately one million, while a similar number were forced to emigrate. The Irish population fell to just over four million by the beginning of the twentieth century. Christine Kinealy's survey is long established as the most complete, scholarly survey of the Great Famine yet produced. First published in 1994, This Great Calamity remains an exhaustive and indefatigable look into the event that defined Ireland as we know it today.