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Meagher’s ‘Drunken Freaks’& Old Abe ‘Astonished’: The Last Letters of John...
Corporal John Doherty of the Irish Brigade wrote a series of letters home to his family from Virginia and Maryland in the summer of 1862. Transcribed here for the first time, the letters detail John’s...
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The Irish Brigade at Antietam: A Photographic Tour
Many of the posts on this site explore elements of the Irish experience at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, fought on 17th September 1862. Many of the widow’s pension...
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‘Our Pickets Were Gobbled’: Assessing the Mass Capture of the 69th New York,...
On 30th October 1864 the famed 69th New York Infantry suffered one of it’s most embarrassing moments of the war, when a large number of its men were captured having barely fired a shot. In the latest...
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Analysing 19th Century Emigration, A Case Study: Dissecting One Irishman’s...
As regular readers are aware, I have long been an advocate of the need to study the thousands of Irish-American letters contained within the Civil War Widows & Dependent Pension Files. This unique...
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War Prices! War Prices! Advertisements Aimed at Irish Soldiers & their...
We live in an age of seemingly incessant and increasingly intrusive advertising. In a world where algorithms monitor our online browsing to offer us individually tailored ads, it is easy to consider...
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“I am the Same Boy yet”: The Civil War Letters of Daniel Crowley, Part 2
The site welcomes back Catherine Bateson of the University of Edinburgh for the second in her series on the 1864 letters of Cork native Daniel Crowley, who served in the 28th Massachusetts Infantry,...
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“I am so heartily sick of this life”: The Civil War Letter of Daniel Crowley,...
I am pleased to bring to readers the third and final instalment of Catherine Bateson’s guest posts charting the correspondence of Cork’s Daniel Crowley, who served in the 28th Massachusetts Infantry,...
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'As Good A Chance to Escape As Any Other': A Cork Soldier's Aid to His Family...
Occasionally, I am asked why any Irish impacted by the American Civil War should be remembered in Ireland. After all, the argument goes, these people left our shores, and they weren’t fighting for...
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The Madigans: Famine Survival, Emigration & Obligation in 19th Century...
Each pension file contains fragments of one Irish family’s story. They are rarely complete, but nonetheless they often offer us rare insight into aspects of the 19th century Irish emigrant experience....
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New York’s “Monster Irish Festival”& the Widows of Bull Run, 1861
In August 1861, tens of thousands of Irish immigrants took part in a “Monster Irish Festival” on Manhattan. Organised to benefit the widows and orphans of Irish men who had fallen at Bull Run, its...
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