Faith Fraternity And Fighting

This book fills one of the most significant gaps in modern British historiography. Despite its public profile, the Orange Order has not attracted commensurate scholarly attention. Uncritical apologists apart, historians have displayed condescending censure, stigmatising and dismissing the Order as sectarian - a term unduly restricted in their studies to violence and demonstrations. Having gained unique access to lodge membership records, MacRaild provides a timely corrective. MacRaild makes excellent use of archive material to provide a fascinating study of 'diasporic' Orangeism, showing how it was imported into mainland Britain and implanted within working-class communities as a 'way of life', able to attract adherents with no obvious Irish provenance or connection (the Toxteth lodge in North West England has a not insignificant black presence.) Impeccably researched and expertly written, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting is a major achievement and an important step in rescuing Orangeism from the stigma of sectarianism.

This is the first textbook on the history of modern Ireland to adopt a social history perspective. Written by an international team of leading scholars, it draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches and consistently sets Irish developments in a wider European and global context.

Vaughan renews perspectives on the changes brought about by Irish migrant communities in terms of identity, politics and religion. The book examines on the experience of generations of Irish migrants in the West of Scotland from the aftermath of the Great Famine until the creation of the Republic of Ireland.

The study of popular culture has been an abiding preoccupation of historians and other academics, not just in the British Isles but elsewhere too. This volume of essays explores the manifestations of popular culture and belief in England, Ireland and Wales from the Reformation onwards. As an interdisciplinary collection it brings together specialists in English Literature, History, Celtic and Religious Studies. It offers new insights thematically via a selection of diverse contributions. The nexus between religion and popular culture links the contributions together, while the geographical spread of the topic facilitates a dynamic comparative methodology. What emerges from these explorations of rites of passage, festivals, revivalism, print culture and gender is the remarkable resilience of popular culture and the extent to which all levels of society were prepared to compromise.

The book examines how an organisation originating in late eighteenth-century Ireland became a significant and controversial element in Liverpool history. Using a wide range of sources including rarely accessed Orange Order records it places the Order within an early nineteenth-century Liverpool context of apocalyptic evangelical Protestantism, a labour market dominated by irregular dock work, a growing influx of immigrant Catholic Irish, marked residential segregation and sporadic civil conflict. It explores how the Order survived official disapproval, dissolution and schism to become deeply rooted within Protestant working-class communities. It analyses the attractions of lodge life, the appeal of ritual, colourful regalia and 12th July processions, the intense social bonding within lodges, the mutual support provided in adversity and measure taken to guard and transmit their world view. The intense royalism and patriotism of the Order and its troubled relationship with the Church of England are examined plus its role in sustaining the working class Tory vote which contributed to a century long Conservative hegemony in city politics. The book concludes with the cultural and socio-economic changes in British society which marginalised the core concerns of the Order, triggering decline in strength, visibility and significance in civic life.

Street processions were a defining feature of life in the Victorian town. They were diverse in character and took place regularly throughout the year in all towns. They provided opportunities for men and women to display themselves in public, carrying banners and flags and accompanied by musical bands. Much of the history of nineteenth-century Wales has been written around political demonstrations and revolt, but this book examines how urban communities in Victorian Wales created inclusive civic identities by using the streets for peaceful processions.

The decade of the 1860s was a turbulent period in Irish politics, both at home and abroad, and saw the rise and apparent failure of the separatist Fenian movement. In England, this period also witnessed the first realistic attempt at establishing a genuinely popular press amid Irish migrants to Britain. This was to be an ideological battle as both secular nationalists and the Roman Catholic Church, for their very distinct reasons, desperately wished to communicate with a reading public which owed its existence in large measure to the massive immigration of the years of the Famine. Based on extensive archival research, this book provides the first serious study of the Irish press in Britain for any period, through a detailed analysis of three London newspapers, The Universal News (1860-9), The Irish Liberator (1863-4) and The Irish News (1867). In so doing, it provides us with a window onto the complex of relationships which shaped the lives of the migrants: with each other, with their English fellow Catholics, with the Catholic Church and with the state. A central question for this press was how to reconcile the twin demands of faith and fatherland.

Stimulating essays that break new ground on religion and Irish identity in modern world history.