Sacco and Vanzetti, Mary Donovan and transatlantic radicalism in the 1920s

In 1927 the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston following a murder trial that was widely denounced for its anti-labour and anti-immigrant bias. From 1921 the campaign to save the two men powerfully mobilised labour internationalism and triggered waves of protests across the world. This article examines the important contributions made by Irish and Irish-American radicals to the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign. Mary Donovan was a leading member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and a second-generation Irish union organiser and member of Boston's James Connolly Club. In the 1920s she travelled to Ireland twice and appealed to Irish and Irish American labour to support the campaign. At the same time, Donovan and many of the activists considered here held ambiguous personal and political relationships with Ireland. Transnational Irish radicalism in the early-twentieth century is most commonly considered in nationalist terms. Taking a distinctly non-Irish cause - the Sacco-Vanzetti case of 1920-7 - allows us to look from a different perspective at the global Irish Revolution and reveals how radical labour currents reached into Irish and Irish-American circles during the revolutionary era, though the response to the campaign also indicates a receding internationalism in the immediate aftermath of Irish independence

Book review: Ribbon Societies in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and its Diaspora by Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild

In the 1810s, Ribbon societies appeared in Ulster, emerging from the aftermath of 1798, Defenderism and the sectarian tensions of the late-eighteenth century. Throughout most of the nineteenth-century Ribbonism, and anxieties about it, reached into multiple aspects of Irish society, yet very few people ever openly admitted membership and almost all evidence of Ribbon activities lies in police and court records. Varieties of Ribbonism have generated very rich historiography, but most historians have framed their studies within a particular chronological or regional framework. This engaging book by Kyle Hughes and Donald MacRaild presents the first full-length study that ranges across the nineteenth century and investigates multifaceted dimensions of Ribbonism in Ireland and the diaspora

Landlords, radicals and Irish emigrants in Argentina

[In the 1880s an Irish immigrant doctor in Argentina named John Creaghe sought to a build a Land League movement in his adopted home. The Irish Land League appealed to him because of its impact in Ireland, but more significant for him was the potential to deploy the same ideas and tactics to challenge the power of large landowners in Argentina, some of whom were Irish themselves. “Let it be known,” Creaghe wrote, “that there are no worse landlords in the world than the ignorant Irishmen who in former years were able to buy land and are now millionaires.” ...

The importance of space for understanding political mobilisation

This special issue considers the categories of ‘homeland’ and ‘hostland’ as a means to approach questions of identity, loyalty and estrangement that both inspired and shaped political mobilisation in the early twentieth century world. The decade prior to the First World War and the wartime era can be considered as a transitional juncture, spreading across historians’ periodisations. These years represent the final frame of the long nineteenth century and the closure of the belle époque, the era ending with the outbreak of the First World War, or the watershed year of 1917, which saw the Russian Revolution, the American entry into the war and the fading fortunes of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, they represent the first chapter of the twentieth century, when nationalist and imperialist tensions sharpened and produced a new era of violent conflict. On the one hand, the early twentieth century was a time in which modern territoriality, which Charles S. Maier refers to as the organisation of a ‘space with a border that allows effective control of public and political life’, reached its apogee, as seen in rising nationalism and state centralisation.11. Maier, “Transformations of Territoriality,” 34. View all notes On the other hand, these were years characterised by movement across these same borders: mass migration, colonial expansionism, missionary movements and, in the other direction, imperial fragmentation and regionalism

[Review] Patrick Mannion, 'A Land of Dreams : Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Irish in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Maine, 1880-1923'

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Technical Report: Allergen Advice

A common problem for those affected by serious allergy afflictions is that the rules and laws governing food packaging or general awareness of contaminants vary from country to country. Allergen Advice aims to act as a travelling companion for food related allergy sufferers. Using a simple to use user interface, app users can select their own countries food laws and regulations and compare them with selected destinations. Additional features include a phrasebook, listing common allergens in multiple languages, a community area where people can recommend and view suggested restaurants and a smartwatch extension that alerts a user when they are nearby such a restaurant. While the phrasebook exists in other translation style applications, the allergen information on a country by country basis does not exist currently on the Play Store. As a parent of a child with a severe nut allergy I am acting as one of my own target audience. I love this idea, and the colleagues and friends I have shared it with have endorsed the project as something they would use and recommend to families affected. A closed beta of the application has been viewed, updated and reported on by close friends and colleagues as well as a group of mothers of children suffering from serious food allergies. The goal of this report is to highlight the risk of such allergies as well as to show how easy, and cheap it can be to create an application not for monetary gain