The Great Irish Famine in Irish and UK history textbooks, 2010–2020

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. OSCAR WILDE Is 1995, when first learned that New Jersey Education Commission had been empowered by legislature to consider course materials on wide range of genocides, contacted Dr. Paul Winkler, Executive Director of Commission, and asked him if Great Irish Famine could be included. He immediately asked me, Are you claiming genocide? said, I would like teachers and students to make up their own minds. He agreed, and encouraged development of our Irish Famine Curriculum. The 116-page curriculum is available on Web site of Nebraska Department of Education. Any teacher or student with a computer and modem can read, print, or download all of it using HTML or PDF formats. The Illinois, Colorado, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Idaho Departments of Education have linked to curriculum on Nebraska site, along with National Archives of Republic of Ireland and Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) at Syracuse University. The curriculum is indexed by Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) at Indiana University, which has distributed microfiche copies to one thousand subscribing college and university libraries. The New Jersey curriculum was approved by state Commission on 10 September 1996 and distributed to state schools. The following month, New York Governor George Pataki signed a law mandating instruction on mass starvation in Ireland. The Sunday Times of London responded on 13 October with a staff editorial entitled An Irish Hell, but not a which stated: To compare, as Mr. Pataki has done, Britain's policy to that of Hitler towards Jews is as unhistorical as it is offensive. Not least to Jews, tragedy of whose is necessarily lessened by comparison with an Irish catastrophe that was neither premeditated nor man-made. Yet Governor Pataki had not compared Great Famine to in either his written or spoken remarks. A week later, British Ambassador John Kerr wrote to Pataki, saying: It seems to me rather insulting to many millions who suffered and died in concentration camps across Europe to imply that their man-made fate was in any way analogous to natural disaster in Ireland a century before. The Famine, unlike Holocaust, was not deliberate, not premeditated, not man-made, not genocide, (1) On 10 March 1997 Washington Times published a full-page Insight magazine editorial deriding Pataki as the greatest liar in America and ridiculing idea of Irish Famine education. You say Potato, They say Holocaust was illustrated by a photograph of a potato wrapped in barbed wire. On 26 August, Boston Globe published Unnecessary Curriculum Bill, attacking Massachusetts State Senator Warren Tolman for promoting instruction on Great Irish Famine, Armenian Genocide, and Holocaust: As Tolman bill is now worded, teachers might be encouraged to treat Irish famine on same level of moral depravity as Armenian genocide and Holocaust. That would be a misreading of historical record. While British approach to mass starvation was often brutal, arrogant and unfeeling, no state-run death camps disfigured Irish countryside. The argument that classroom discussion of mass starvation should be discouraged because British behavior did not match barbarity of Nazis during is central to all objections against famine education. Because is best documented, most systematic, cruel, and ruthless genocide of twentieth century, it has almost become very definition of genocide. Opponents of famine education raise with intention of demonstrating that, if Great Irish Famine was not comparable (no state-run death camps), then famine was not a matter of genocide. …

LOCAL RELIEF DURING THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE, 1845–1850: THE CASE OF CASTLEBAR, COUNTY MAYO, 1846–1847 MICHAEL O’MALLEY the objective of this paper is to contrast the relief efforts of the British government with those of locals leaders including Church of Ireland and Catholic clergymen in Castlebar, County Mayo, during the Great Irish Famine. Between 1845 and 1850, almost every harvest of potatoes, the subsistence food for most of Ireland’s inhabitants before the famine, failed partially or totally. The potato crops’ destruction resulted in starvation and death throughout Ireland. During the crisis, both the British government and local leaders in Ireland attempted to reduce the level of suffering by providing famine relief. Five factors determined the effectiveness of these relief efforts: the relief providers’ ideology; their preferred forms of relief; their initiative in establishing effective relief schemes before starvation took place; their attitude toward the poor; and their willingness to prioritize famine relief. The government and the clergy took different stands on these issues. The government adhered to a free-trade policy and argued that direct relief would stifle private enterprise. It favored indirect relief in the form of public works to direct relief in the form of free food. In addition, the government feared that direct relief would produce a dependent public. Finally , the government believed that its first priority was to protect the immediate interests of England. As a result, the government failed to provide adequate relief in famine-stricken Ireland. In contrast, Church of Ireland and Catholic clergy in Castlebar viewed the problem of famine relief from a local perspective. Their primary goal during the late 1840s was to prevent starvation among their neighbors. As a result, the clergy favored direct relief , in the form of inexpensive food, and established soup kitchens, which provided sustenance to the poor as soon as famine conditions appeared locally in late 1846. LOCAL RELIEF DURING THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE 109 During the Great Famine, British government administrators—including Sir Charles Trevelyan, permanent secretary of the treasury, and Thomas Larcom, a poor law commissioner—criticized local relief efforts and praised those the government provided. Trevelyan argued that the government’s soup kitchens, which operated for a brief period in 1847, saved millions of lives during the famine.1 Larcom claimed that the middle classes within Irish society did not try to relieve starvation during the famine.2 These views were echoed in English newspapers such as The London Times, which reported that farmers were “capable of relief by the smallest exertion” and that this lack of generosity was “absolutely without parallel in the history of civilized nations. . . .”3 The newspaper also accused the Irish poor of being too indolent to give their dead a “decent Christian burial” and pointed out that “the brutality of piratical tribes sinks to nothing compared with the absolute inertia of the Irish in the midst of the most horrifying scenes.”4 Revisionist historians such as Roy Foster sympathize with Trevelyan’s interpretation of the British government’s role in the famine.5 According to Foster, the British did not cause mass starvation during the late 1840s. In addition, he believes that an evaluation of Britain’s famine policy must include a discussion of the ability of the state to relieve poverty as well as an analysis of the attitudes of mid-nineteenth-century English political leaders toward the poor.6 Foster asserts that the provision to the public of free food was beyond the abilities of any government at that time. He claims that political leaders rejected proposals to provide famine relief because they felt that this move would turn the Irish into paupers and make them permanently dependent on the state for sustenance. Consequently, the British adhered to the belief that private enterprise should provide most of the food required to feed famine-stricken Ireland.7 LOCAL RELIEF DURING THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE 110 1 Charles Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (London: Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 64, 65. 2 Final Report of the Board of Public Works in Ireland, September 1847, British Parliamentary Papers—Famine (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970), vol. 8, 379–85. Quoted in Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish...

Here Ireland's premier economic historian and one of the leading authorities on the Great Irish Famine examines the most lethal natural disaster to strike Europe in the nineteenth century. Between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the food source that we still call the Irish potato had allowed the fastest population growth in the whole of Western Europe. As vividly described in O Grada's new work, the advent of the blight phytophthora infestans transformed the potato from an emblem of utility to a symbol of death by starvation. The Irish famine peaked in Black '47, but it brought misery and increased mortality to Ireland for several years. Central to Irish and British history, European demography, the world history of famines, and the story of American immigration, the Great Irish Famine is presented here from a variety of new perspectives. Moving away from the traditional narrative historical approach to the catastrophe, O Grada concentrates instead on fresh insights available through interdisciplinary and comparative methods. He highlights several economic and sociological features of the famine previously neglected in the literature, such as the part played by traders and markets, by medical science, and by migration. Other topics include how the Irish climate, usually hospitable to the potato, exacerbated the failure of the crops in 1845-1847, and the controversial issue of Britain's failure to provide adequate relief to the dying Irish. O Grada also examines the impact on urban Dublin of what was mainly a rural disaster and offers a critical analysis of the famine as represented in folk memory and tradition. The broad scope of this book is matched by its remarkable range of sources, published and archival. The book will be the starting point for all future research into the Irish famine.

CURING “THE IRISH MORAL PLAGUE” MICHAEL de NIE Recent scholarship on the Great Irish Famine has begun to emphasize the importance of understanding the political and ideological context in which the British government formulated its much criticized relief policies.1 A crucial element of this context of ideas includes the views and opinions of England’s middle class. During a period of weak governments, political flux, and growing radicalism, the middle-class segment of British society exercised increasing influence in the public sphere. One of the best reflections we have of the opinions of the middle class in this period is provided by the mainstream British press. Periodicals such as the Times, the Illustrated London News, the Economist, Punch, the Quarterly Review, and the Edinburgh Review simultaneously expressed and molded the views of their middle-class readership. While British public opinion was of course composed of numerous diverse and competing elements, it is reasonably safe to argue that the major current of middle-class thought was represented in the pages of these newspapers and journals. Editorials and reports on famine policy were in turn read by members of the government for whom the popular press provided a major source of insight into the minds of their constituents. In this way, the press was fundamental in the definition of political boundaries during the famine. This essay will examine a somewhat neglected aspect of public opinion and press coverage during the famine: the wider question of Ireland’s rehabilitation and regeneration. Throughout the famine years, a vague but CURING “THE IRISH MORAL PLAGUE” 63 1 See James S. Donnelly, Jr., “Irish property must pay for Irish poverty”: British public opinion and the Great Irish Famine,” in Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine, eds. C. Morash and R. Hayes (Dublin, 1996), 60–96; and Peter Gray, “Punch and the Great Famine,” History Ireland 1:2 (Summer 1993): 26–33; “Ideology and the Famine,” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Póirtéir (Dublin, 1995), 86–103; and “Potatoes and Providence: British Government Responses to the Great Famine,” Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal 1:1 (Spring 1994): 75–90. strongly felt need for a fundamental moral and economic transformation of Ireland informed views of Irish distress and British government relief policy. Members of the press saw the famine as an opportunity to modernize Ireland and enact a moral and economic revolution. A prostrate, dependent Ireland, it was argued, could not resist the prescriptions advocated by the press and public—and instituted by the government. It appeared that the forces that had resisted British civilization were now laid low in Ireland , and that economic and social theories could be implemented instead of merely argued. Before we examine the proposals for Ireland’s re-creation in the image of Britain, a brief description of the sources used in this examination of British public opinion will help outline the political positions and popular influences of the major periodicals of the 1840s. The Times, indisputably the largest and most powerful newspaper of this period, had a steadily growing circulation, which by 1850 had topped 38,000.2 Often described as the “Fourth Estate” or the “fourth arm of government,” the Times had unparalleled access to, and influence on, leading politicians. In the 1840s the newspaper supported repeal of the Corn Laws and remained mildly laissez -faire afterward. Politically, the Times was slightly pro-Whig, but this position did not prevent it from harshly criticizing Lord John Russell’s administration on numerous occasions. Along with the Times, the Illustrated London News and Punch, both weeklies, collectively exerted considerable sway over their London and provincial readers, who in turn formed a great portion of what was seen as national middle-class opinion.3 Each newspaper addressed a different aspect of middle-class taste. Punch, with a circulation of approximately 30,000 in the late 1840s, was at times light-hearted and satirical, but it also exhibited a social conscience with regard to the living conditions of the English working class.4 Such sympathy rarely extended to the Irish. The Illustrated London News presented its readers with a mixture of political, social , and cultural commentary.5 Politically nonpartisan...

This paper advances the current debates on famine and famine history, with a focus on the first half of the 18th century in Ireland. Ireland was often hit by severe famines and two of them, specifically the famines of 1728–1729 and 1740–1741, are at the center of this article. The analysis of those famines will show the relevance of weather extremes as one driver in the functional chain of famines. Analyzing the linkage between weather extremes and social, political and economic vulnerabilities of the society further enhances the debate on past famines. Additionally, this paper focuses on the migration flows in the context of both Irish famines. These migration flows lay the foundation for the migration patterns during the “Great Irish Famine” of 1845–1852.

This study conducted a genre analysis to determine the representations in primary school science textbooks. Multiple representations in textbooks indicate multimodality. This study adopted a multimodal genre analysis approach to review the multiple representations in textbooks within the framework of the 'scientific' genre. The sample consisted of two primary school textbooks taught to third and fourth graders within the scope of 'the science' course in the 2021-2022 academic year. The data were gathered based on document analysis and analyzed using content analysis. Frequency and percentage were used for analysis. The results show that the most common representations in the textbooks are photographs and iconic diagrams. The third-grade textbook has more representations than the fourth-grade textbook. The representations in the textbooks are primarily associated with the scientific genres 'explanation' and 'information report.' Of the scientific genres in the textbooks, photographs are primarily used in 'information report,' 'explanation,' and 'narration.' Iconic diagram representation is preferred in 'experimental,' 'argumentative,' and 'technical procedure.' Certain representations are predominantly used in the textbooks, indicating that the textbooks lack a diversity of representations. In addition, the scientific genres are underrepresented in the textbooks, suggesting that the textbooks underutilize the advantages offered by different types of representations. We recommend that textbooks should be enriched with representations and scientific genres.

This study focused on how historical contextualisation is reflected in 12 history textbooks for primary schools in Ghana. The study employed a content analysis design to analyse how historical contextualisation is reflected in history textbooks. A multi-stage sampling technique was used in selecting 12 textbooks to represent the 6 classes in the Ghanaian primary school. A thematic matrix was developed from historical thinking frameworks to collect data from the textbooks. Microsoft Excel functions were used to rate the textbooks on a scale of 0–5, depending on the amount of evidence of historical contextualisation. Descriptive statistics and Maton’s (2013) principle of shift in the Semantic Wave were used in the analysis to determine the level of evidence of historical contextualisation in the textbooks. The study established that historical contextualisation is reflected in the history textbooks used in the study. This study contributes to understanding how textbook writers incorporate historical contextualisation within textbook narratives to meet history curriculum requirements. It gives an understanding of how historical contextualisation is needed in history textbooks to promote historical reasoning among textbook users such as teachers and students. Possible implications of the findings are discussed in the main text.

Reviewed by: The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture ed. by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald Barbara M. Hoffmann The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018, 296 p., paperback, $39.95) Turning point, calamity, revolution, horror: these are but a few of the terms used to describe An Gorta Mór by the contributors to The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald. These terms—complex and almost contradictory in connotation—speak to the difficulty of representing the Famine, both at the contemporaneous moment and for generations after living with its legacy. With this important contribution to famine studies, Corporaal, Frawley and Mark-FitzGerald offer the first edited collection devoted to an entirely visual and material culture perspective on the Great Famine. The editors have divided the collection into three sections that follow, as Mark-FitzGerald notes in her introduction to the text, a "roughly chronological sequence": Section I, "Witness and Representation: Contemporaneous Depictions of Famine"; Section II, "Negotiating Form: Famine/Post-Famine Modalities and Media"; and Section III, "Legacy: Postmemory and Contemporary [End Page 147] Visual Cultures." The collection's range comes not only from this broad temporal view but also from the diversity of perspectives of the contributors, who hail from universities across Europe and North America as well as from institutions such as Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and the Irish Heritage Trust and National Famine Museum in Strokestown Park, County Roscommon. Likewise, the contributed essays cover an impressive array of visual and material products: paintings and sketches, political cartoons, religious artifacts, textiles, memorials, television shows, graphic novels, and even a film that never was. This variety and diversity, looking to capture a fuller picture of the Famine in history and memory, is enhanced by another focus of the collection, as explained by Mark-FitzGerald: "prioritiz[ing] methodologically close readings of specific engagements with the famine." Rather than presenting broad or universalizing claims about the Famine and its representation, each chapter engages specific examples of visual and material culture, offering nuanced analysis of the product or production itself within its specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. Enhancing this goal, and an invaluable part of this collection, are the thirty-nine brilliant reproductions of the paintings, drawings, and artifacts discussed by the contributors. The four chapters in section one exploring contemporaneous material and visual items all deal with a predominant presumption that the Famine was a moment of aporia in terms of cultural production, not only because, as Niamh O'Sullivan points out in her chapter, "Irish artists tended to avoid the appalling conditions in which the majority lived" but also because that majority's struggle to survive supplanted all leisurely or artistic activities. The contributions in section one suggest that, while representations of the Famine by or depicting the actual suffering of the famine victims may be rare to nonexistent, exploring representations beyond that focus, both within Ireland and abroad, can offer a fuller understanding of the Famine. This suggestion to look beyond seemingly obvious images of the Famine is manifested in the first chapter, O'Sullivan's "The Bond that Knit the Peasant to the Soil: Rural Lore and Superstition in the Work of Daniel Macdonald." Rather than exploring Macdonald's famous 1847 painting An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store—"renowned as the only known painting representing the blight itself"—O'Sullivan examines representations of superstition in his works from just before and during the Famine. She reveals a continuity in such representations, highlighting not only superstition's role in uniting the Irish peasantry and providing a link between life pre- and post-Famine but also its connection to sedition and proto-nationalism that heightened during the Famine. In the second chapter, "HB's Famine Cartoons: Satirical Art in a Time of [End Page 148] Catastrophe," Peter Gray explores depictions of the Famine in the political cartoons by the London-based middle-class Catholic Irishman John Doyle, known as "H. B.," aimed at a...

Scholars have long debated whether there was enough food in Ireland to feed the population during the Great Irish Famine; there has been less detailed examination of high-frequency data to understand how markets distributed food after the harvests failed. This article explores a hitherto unused weekly price and quantity data set from the Cork city markets to analyse how markets may have hindered the distribution of available food from 1846 to 1849. Although, historically, economists have long suspected that raw data on the market for potatoes during the Irish Famine behaved like that for a classical ‘Giffen’ good, there is little evidence for this among foodstuffs available throughout the crisis in Cork. But bacon pigs – a food that never reached a stable equilibrium but completely disappeared from the market in 1847 – exhibited some characteristics which do not appear to accord with the classical law of demand. Further analysis of this data suggests that middle-class purchasing power outbid the poorest people in Ireland at a time when there was a surplus of superior foods and a deficiency of inferior foods. These circumstances indicate that unusual market behaviour may have made the crop failure’s redistributive consequences – as well as its mortality toll – much worse.

Famines in European Economic History: Introduction Section 1: Great Irish Famine [An Gorta Mor], 1845-1850 1. From the haggart to the Hudson: Irish Famine across many geographical scales 2. Tracing 'the march of the enemy': Regional and local experiences of the Irish famine 3. The Great British Famine of 1845-50? Ireland, the UK and Peripherality in Famine Relief and Philanthropy Section 2: Finnish Famine, [Suuret Nalkavuodet] 1867-1868 4. Finland's Hunger Years of the 1860s: Nineteenth Century Context 5. Feeding the Famine: Social Vulnerability and Dislcation During the Finnish Famine of the 1860s 6. 'The Terrible Visitation': Famine in Finland and Ireland 1845-68 Section 3: Ukrainian Famine [Holodomor], 1932-1933 7. origins and course of the famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine 8. 1932-33 famine losses in Ukraine within the context of the Soviet Union 9. uses of hunger: Stalin's solution of the peasant and national questions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932-1933

This paper compares the narratives on the Famine in Irish and Ukrainian history textbooks and examines to what extent these narratives are coloured by a nationalist discourse. It argues that the story of the Famine in Irish history textbooks has changed from nationalist propaganda to a more balanced narrative, and that this change was brought about by the social transformations in the 1960s. The paper further observes that the current Ukrainian textbooks display quite a variation in the selection and interpretation of events relating to the Famine. Whereas some show a considerable nationalist bias, others present more moderate views. The trajectory of Irish narratives lends support to a theory that relates politicized historiography to the age of a state and to the consolidation of democracy. The diverse pattern of Ukrainian narratives, however, is difficult to reconcile with theories linking historiography to the wider social and political context. This pattern suggests that young states and/or states emerging from authoritarian rule need not automatically entertain uniformly nationalist or otherwise ideologically coloured discourses in the immediate post‐independence period.

“What tone do you use?” This is a question raised in an essay by the novelist Colm Toibin in which he ponders the difficulties faced by historians when writing about the Great Irish Famine. In view of that topic’s scale and complexity, the question is hardly out of place. Between 1845 and 1852, approximately one million men, women and children died of starvation and disease, while another million and a half fled overseas to Canada, America, Australia and Britain. The underlying cause of this massive depopulation was an unknown disease which destroyed the potato, the food on which nearly four million Irish people depended for their sustenance. In short, it was a natural disaster. But as Judith Shklar has argued, although “the immediate onset of famine is caused by natural misfortune [...] its persistence owes far more to human injustice or folly or both. Because there is a nonhuman element in famines, it is particularly easy to think of them as inevitable.” But in any assessment of the causes and consequences of famine, the question of human responsibility cannot be evaded. In the case of the Irish Famine, this question has long been a matter of contention. Up through the early 1950’s, historical writing on the Famine was dominated by a nationalist interpretation which held the British government and the landlord class responsible for mass death and largescale emigration. This view was eventually challenged by so-called revisionist historians who defended the establishment and dismissed the nationalist interpretation as too politically and emotionally charged to warrant credibility. The problem with both of these readings is not so much their interpretations per se as the one raised by Toibin: the problem of tone. Historians of both camps insist that their own view of responsibility is correct, leaving little or no scope for discussion. Such coerciveness, perhaps more forceful in nationalist works, but

Textbooks are one of the primary sources for students to obtain knowledge, so they should present accurate knowledge through textual and visual representations. The goal of the current study is to examine the representations in middle school science textbooks based on the diagram coding scheme to find out a general picture of how representations used in the science textbooks over the fifteen years. The sample consists of 6247 representations from twelve middle school science textbooks (four each of sixth, seventh, and eighth grades) from 2002 to 2017. Content analysis was used to analyze the representations in textbooks, which were gathered by document analysis. The representations were evaluated concerning the combination of two main diagram coding schemes. Findings showed that iconic representations are prevalent in middle school science textbooks. There are limited charts, graphs and augmented reality representations in the science textbooks. Furthermore, there are more male representations than female ones, representations are mostly indexed in the main texts, and captions are mainly problematic in middle school science textbooks. The findings based on the two diagrams coding scheme are mainly coherent with each other. Science textbooks should encourage students to interpret and translate between different representations to enable them accurate knowledge.

Cultural representation in foreign/second language textbooks has received considerable research attention in recent years. This diachronic study reviews previous studies’ methodological trends and research foci on cultural representation in L2 Mandarin textbooks from 2005–2020. It systematically searched all relevant publications in three accessible databases: Web of Science, Scopus, and CNKI. A total number of 48 relevant publications were collected and analyzed. The review indicates that most publications are empirical studies, covering qualitative, quantitative, and mixed studies and most sampled textbooks are elementary textbooks from China. It also reveals that the main source for collecting data is documented, and the commonly used data analysis methods are comparative, content, discourse, and semiotic analysis. Besides that, examining cultural elements in textbooks seems to be a key research focus among the publications, followed by analyzing cultural orientation, unconventional culture phenomenon, and ideology behind cultural representation in textbooks. The current study contributes to the literature by providing a detailed review of cultural representation in L2 Mandarin textbooks and identifying the research gaps. Accordingly, it concludes with recommendations for future research to study cultural representation in textbooks.

This case study examines how a topic of Irish history, the Irish Famine 1845-49, is represented over time in history textbooks used in English secondary schools and whether and to what extent ethnocentrism is inherent in this presentation. The concept of ethnocentrism is used as a framework for interpreting the presentation of the topic. A strategy of content analysis of samples of history textbooks from the 1920s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to the present is used. The conclusion drawn from the analysis is that the history of the Irish Famine is marginalised in the overall sample and that the textbooks contain examples of both direct and indirect ethnocentrism. The conclusion also highlights the importance of maintaining an intercultural approach when designing school curricula and of providing alternative accounts of history to that of the dominant culture.