"The Indispensable Informer": Daniel O'Sullivan Goula and the Phoenix Society, 1858-59

The Deportation of James Larkin:Irish American Politics and the British, American, and Free State Governments Gerry Watts (bio) James Larkin (1874–1947) was founder and leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU). Almost single-handedly he organized the lowest-paid workers in Ireland, laborers who worked in subhuman conditions and lived in cramped and unhygienic housing where malnourishment and disease were rampant and mortality rates high at the turn of the century. Through his inspiring leadership and oratorical skills, he captured the imagination of the Irish working class, empowering them with a sense of their own destiny. After the travails of the 1913 Lockout, Larkin left Ireland in 1914 and landed in the United States with the double aim of furthering Irish nationalism and worldwide social revolution. Although Larkin did not ultimately achieve these goals, he did play a part in promoting Irish nationalism in the run-up to the 1916 Rising. He also worked within American trade unions, campaigned against the war, and was instrumental in the formation of the American Communist Labor Party. After an initial period working with the Irish American organization Clan na Gael, Larkin fell out with the group over political aims and in 1920 was convicted of criminal anarchy and incarcerated in the New York state penitentiary system. Three years later, he was given a full pardon by the New York governor Al Smith, and shortly thereafter he was deported from the United States by the department of labor. For his troubles, he was often penniless, subject to arrest, and exposed to danger. This essay will look at the role played by individuals within the Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, [End Page 186] the FBI), Clan na Gael, and the Irish Free State and British governments in the deportation process of Larkin in America. This process was begun in February 1919 but only completed in April 1923. Deportation was the legal sanction for an alien charged and convicted of criminal anarchy. However, Larkin instead received a sentence of imprisonment, with deportation carried out only after a long delay. Consequently, he was unable to return to Ireland during the critical period of the War of Independence and the formation of the Free State between January 1919 and January 1923. A look at the people and circumstances surrounding his incarceration will renew focus on this period of Larkin's life, particularly the role played by Clan na Gael members in the judicial process, at his trial, and during his lengthy appeals process wherein a conviction was secured without deportation. This essay will inquire into whether or not this was a tactic on the part of Clan na Gael members to keep Larkin away from Ireland and stop him from interfering with the work of Sinn Féin. The "nationalist plot" to have Larkin assassinated in 1919, first brought to light by scholar Claire Culleton, is closely connected to these events and will receive attention here as well.1 I will first assess the authenticity of the plot and then ask if its underlying motives were similar to the tactics of Clan na Gael in Larkin's judicial process—namely, that in both cases the motive was to keep Larkin away from Irish affairs. The essay will also look at the role the British state and Free State played in keeping Larkin away from Ireland. It will consider aspects such as the British exclusion order keeping the labor leader out of Ireland, intelligence discussions on Larkin between Dublin Castle and the War Office in London, and the use made by the Free State of the Irish consular service in New York and the office of the Irish Trade Representative in tracking his activities. This analysis takes the form of an investigation and intends therefore to set out a series of exploratory questions. [End Page 187] Larkin is "Shadowed" by Dublin Castle Following the outcome of the 1913 Lockout, Larkin had become despondent. The outbreak of war in August 1914, however, changed the political landscape significantly, pushing Larkin to the fore once again—not as a revolutionary strike leader this time, but as...

Reviewed by: Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in the Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads by Sarah F. Williams Marie Thompson (bio) Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in the Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads. By Sarah F. Williams. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015. 240pp. In March 1618 Mother Joan Flower and her two daughters, Margaret and Philippa Flower, were tried and executed in rural Lincolnshire. The three women were suspected of being witches and were accused of cursing the house of the Earl of Rutland, by whom the family had previously been employed. Less than a year after their trial and execution, two accounts of the Flower family’s crimes and fate appeared in bookshops in central London, including the broadside ballad Damnable [End Page 118] Practises (17). The ballad transmits the accuseds’ “examinations and confessions” and describes Joan Flower as a “swearing and blaspheming wretch” who was reported to deal with spirits. “Sister Phillip” is said to have been a lewd “strumpet” who bewitched and subdued young men. According to the ballad’s text, these women were acting on behalf of the devil: “Hereat the Divell made entrance in, his Kingdome to inlarge. And puts his executing wrath, unto these women charge” (171). It is from this ballad that Sarah F. Williams’s remarkable book Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in the Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads takes its title. Williams examines how broadside ballads—foliosized publications consisting of hastily produced verse, orally circulated tunes, and woodcut imagery—reflected, perpetuated, and disseminated female stereotypes and reinforced gender hierarchies and moral values. She presents the ballad as “a uniquely powerful social tool” (1) that entertained and titillated but also informed and educated a diverse audience on, among other things, dangerous women, female crimes, and feminine transgressions. The singing, hearing, and seeing of broadside ballads was a daily experience for the majority of early modern English citizens (1). These ballads were performed in the streets and in the court, while ballads in printed form were part of the standard décor of seventeenth-century English homes, alehouses, markets, and victualing houses (55). Through performance and display, Williams argues, broadside ballads shaped early modern social attitudes to women (12). Examining the relations between broadside ballads and their cultural context, Williams convincingly argues that the broadside ballad and its associated music generate and articulate connections between various types of female crime, the supernatural, religious prejudices, noisy auditory signifiers, and notions of excess and disorder. Williams clearly delineates the geographical and temporal scope of her study in her introduction. With regard to the former, she centers on London’s ballad trade, insofar as the city’s urban “perceptions and stereotypes of distant rural locales inform the connections broadsides make between witches, scolds and outsider political and religious groups” (11). With regard to the latter, she focuses on the seventeenth-century ballad trade, since, despite being a time of political instability, this was a period in which “the physical appearance of the ballad, somewhat in flux during the late sixteenth century, became standardized and remained largely unchanged throughout the century” (10). Williams’s study thus concentrates on a collection of ballads produced in London during the seventeenth century that contain within them musico-acoustic stereotypes of feminine transgressions and female maleficence (13). The book consists of four main chapters, each of which addresses a different dimension of the broadside ballad, including its cultural context, musical tunes, verses, meter, and performance. Some common themes appear across chapters (e.g., feminine excess and disorder and anxieties about female voices). The emphasis placed upon these tropes can mean that the writing feels a little repetitive at times; however, given the historical and methodological complexity of the topic at [End Page 119] hand, this repetition is for the most part useful for the reader. Chapter 1, “Witches, Catholics, Scolds and Wives: Noisy Women in Context,” outlines the cultural and political milieu of the ballad. Williams notes how the ballad is expressive of prevalent social anxieties around women in seventeenth-century England, which identified “the locus of transgression primarily as the women’s voice” (21). As this chapter makes clear, these social anxieties...

Maintaining the Cause in the Land of the Free:Ulster Unionists and US Involvement in the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1968-72 Andrew Wilson (bio) From the beginning of the Northern Ireland "Troubles," Irish nationalists have received vital support from America.1 In the mid-1970s John Hume helped to create the congressional Friends of Ireland, a powerful political network which pressured the British government and worked for a constitutional-nationalist agenda on Capitol Hill. In addition, millions of dollars and substantial supplies of US weapons were channeled to the IRA and played a key role in sustaining its campaign of violence. While this Irish-American connection has been the focus of extensive media and scholarly analysis, there has been virtually nothing written about the small, but fiercely determined, unionist support network in the US.2 The following article aims to shed light on this previously neglected dimension of Ulster unionism by outlining the various initiatives that unionists took to counteract Irish-American nationalism in the early 1970s. It examines the major challenges faced by unionists in presenting their perspective in the US and assesses the degree to which their objectives were achieved. [End Page 212] Ulster Unionists and America, 1945–68 Unlike Irish nationalists, unionists have little constituency from which they can draw support in the US. Although over 250,000 Ulster Protestants migrated to America in the eighteenth century, and though most of the 44 million who claimed Irish ancestry in the 1990 census were Protestant, the vast majority are assimilated and have little or no interest in the politics of their ancestral homeland.3 Nevertheless, there was a small network of Ulster Protestant/unionist organizations active in the US after World War II which provided the leadership and membership of new groups that emerged in response to the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. The Orange Order is the oldest surviving fraternal organization in America which has been overwhelmingly shaped by Ulster Protestants and their descendants. The first lodges were formed in eastern cities in the early nineteenth century and became closely associated with the Anglo-American nativist reaction against the growing numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants. As in Ireland, the annual "Twelfth" commemorations of King William of Orange's victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 were often occasions for conflict. The 1831 parade in Philadelphia, for example, ignited pitched battles between Orangemen and Catholic protesters. The worst violence occurred at the New York parades in 1870 and 1871, during which seventy people died and over one hundred were injured.4 In 1870 the Loyal Orange Institution of the United States of America (LOI) was formed to administer the network of lodges which had emerged throughout the country. Within a few decades the LOI claimed over one hundred lodges in twenty-one states and nearly 70,000 members. The LOI's vibrancy was reflected in its ability to host the annual convention of the Imperial Grand Orange Council of the World in New York in 1900.5 [End Page 213] By the first decades of the twentieth century, however, American Orangeism experienced a steady decline in activism and membership. In the 1920s a bitter internal feud led to the emergence of two rival bodies, each claiming to be the Supreme Grand Lodge. Although this schism was eventually healed, one historian concludes that the "injuries sustained" made the "institution in America incapable of recovering its original vitality and strength."6 Other analysts make the obvious point that "the scope for an organization devoted to maintenance of British constitutional and cultural forms was severely limited in the American republic."7 Leaders of the LOI were also perplexed by the inability of brethren to pass enthusiasm for Orangeism to their children—a point later encapsulated in a statement by New York Orangeman Derek Mills, who, when asked to comment about the health of his organization, lamented, "When we get together now, if we get together . . . , we're like a bunch of old ladies, sitting around chatting. We get together to see who's died since the last meeting."8 Yet, despite all the challenges and difficulties, the Orange Order continued to survive. In the...

"The Historian is a Haunted Man":Cecil Woodham-Smith and The Great Hunger Christine Kinealy In the late 1970s, when I was embarking on my doctoral research, my supervisor at Trinity College Dublin told me that I must extend my dissertation on the Poor Law in Ireland, 1838–45, to include the famine period. He then informed me that I should first read Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger. The second suggestion came not because he liked the book—he did not—but because he believed it was the only comprehensive narrative of the tragedy that had made extensive use of archives in Ireland and England. Reading that book proved both heartrending and enlightening. After only a few pages, it was obvious this book went against the prevailing orthodoxies about the Famine, which lay at the heart of the revisionist interpretations. The opening paragraph made the author's sympathies clear: At the beginning of the year 1845 the state of Ireland was, as it had been for nearly seven hundred years, a source of grave anxiety to England. Ireland had first been invaded in 1169; it was now 1845, yet she had been neither assimilated nor subdued. The country had been conquered not once but several times, the land had been confiscated and redistributed over and over again, the population had been brought to the verge of extinction—after Cromwell's conquest and settlement only some half million Irish survived—yet an Irish nation still existed, separate, numerous and hostile.1 Words like "invaded," "conquered," "confiscated," and "an Irish nation" would have been anathema to historians anxious to play down the colonial dimension of Ireland's past relationship with Britain. Moreover, Woodham-Smith clearly was emotionally engaged with her subject matter. But I was fascinated by the book and the controversy it had caused, and I could not wait to visit the archives and learn more about the Great [End Page 134] Famine. Almost thirty years later, I am still learning more about the Famine, in the archives and from recent fine books on the topic. Yet—in terms of readability, quality of research, and scholarship—few can match Woodham-Smith. Yes, the book has its faults and limitations, but some of these flaws have been exaggerated by those who regarded The Great Hunger as undermining the dominant revisionist interpretation which, since the 1930s, had sought to challenge and destroy the "myths" of Irish nationalism.2 In general, revisionists have portrayed the Famine as being inevitable, and adequate relief as being beyond the capability of the British government. By challenging these viewpoints, Woodham-Smith's account became an unwitting tool in the early debate between revisionists and non-revisionist historians. After the outbreak of conflict in Northern Ireland in 1969, the debate intensified, and the divisions widened.3 The meaning of the Great Famine became an ideological battleground on which some of these battles were fought. When The Great Hunger was published, Cecil Woodham-Smith was aged sixty-six and already much acclaimed as a biographer and historian. Her background made her an unlikely candidate to be the chief chronicler of the Great Famine or the subject of ongoing controversy in Irish academia. She was British, wealthy, and described as possessing an "aristocratic appearance"; she would arrive for research visits at the Public Record Office in London in a chauffeur-driven car. Both sides of her family had served as officers in the British army, and she received an English, upper-class education. Though born in Wales, her family background was Irish; her father was descended from Lord Edward Fitz Gerald, a leader of the 1798 Rebellion. Her own rebellious streak was obvious early in her life when she was expelled from the Royal School for Daughters of Officers in the Army, for being absent without permission. While at St. Hilda's College in Oxford, she was temporarily "sent down" for attending an Irish demonstration.4 Her interest in Irish politics persisted. In 1964, she wrote a letter to the Times supporting de Valéra's latest plea for a united Ireland, and gently chastising the BBC for providing daily weather forecasts only for the North.5 [End Page...

Exorcising the Ghosts of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Stewart Parker's The Iceberg and Pentecost Richard Rankin Russell Plays and ghosts have a lot in common. The energy which flows from some intense moment of conflict in a particular time and place seems to activate them both. Plays intend to achieve resolution, however, whilst ghosts appear to be stuck fast in the quest for vengeance. Stewart Parker.1 Stewart Parker's The Iceberg (1974) and Pentecost (1987), works that function as bookends of his all-too-short dramatic career, are haunted by ghosts from Northern Ireland's history.2 Both plays accord with Bernard McKenna's description of Northern Irish drama as "'perform[ing]' moments of rupture that consciously emphasize the destruction of individuals' and communities' identities" (8). The Iceberg stages the loss of pride in the Irish Protestant community surrounding the sinking of the Titanic in 1913, whereas Pentecost explores a seeming triumph of Northern Irish Protestantism, the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike—an event, however, that led to a more inflexible political discourse and additional destructive violence in the province. Both works feature revenants, [End Page 42] persistent ghosts whose claims must be recognized and resolved through a process of reconciliation. Parker's revenants share their marginalized status with other ghosts from literature set in Northern Ireland: for example, Brian Friel's three Catholic characters trapped in the Derry Guildhall in The Freedom of the City (1973) and Seamus Heaney's fisherman friend Louis O'Neill in "Casualty" (1979). Friel's and Heaney's ghosts haunt the places where they were murdered and function as emblems of conscience for their respective authors who reject, finally, the official rhetoric of both Irish nationalism and British authority. Parker's ghosts also haunt their localities, watching and waiting for their presence to be realized and their lives given retrospective value and worth; unlike Heaney's shade of his friend O'Neill, however, they are steadfastly sectarian, bound to their respective Protestant communities by religious and cultural ties. Whereas Heaney's vision of his dead friend leads to a realization that he must leave his Catholic "tribe" to write poetry, Parker's imagined ghosts suggest a commitment to work within his own Protestant community to develop a drama that might soften a hardened political divide. Parker belonged to a cohort at Queen's University in Belfast in the early to mid-1960s that included Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Bernard MacLaverty.3 All joined Philip Hobsbaum's Belfast Group, a writing group modeling a "twin emphasis on ethics and aesthetics" that proved crucial in developing the ecumenical, highly crafted work of participants (Russell, "Inscribing Cultural Corridors" 223). Parker would quickly merge an ethical compulsion to ameliorate sectarian tensions with his developing dramatic craft: his dual concern to experiment with a variety of styles and to fashion plays "composed of parts which work together in harmony" equipped him to critique the random violence and fragmentation in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s in formally diverse plays invoking a vision of cultural wholeness ("The Modern Poet as [End Page 43] Dramatist" 2).4 Parker's early concern with aesthetic harmony coincided with his developing ethical urge to promote social accord in the province through depicting its particularized local situation and engaging members of disparate factions in dialogue. Apparitions in The Iceberg and Pentecost emerge from the sense of deprivation engendered by the conflicts in the North—such as those from the 1910s and 1920s, and the contemporary Troubles that began in 1969, the latter of which includes Protestant opposition that toppled the provisional power-sharing government in 1974. The flitting, circling ghosts in these two dramas invoke that pervasive sense of dislocation among Northern Irish Protestants, who feel neither fully British nor Irish and fear abandonment by Britain. Moreover, these apparitions suggest a generalized Northern Irish working-class dispossession stemming from a shared poverty, a deprivation both fueling sectarianism and existing as a potential bond...

Reviewed by: Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938 by Aidan Beatty Peter B. Strickland Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938, by Aidan Beatty, pp. 266. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. $100. Timed to coincide with the Paris Olympics, the revival of the Tailteann Games in 1924 was intended as a public display of the strength and vitality of a newly independent Ireland. The Olympic-style competitions were open to all men of Irish descent, with athletes traveling to Ireland from the settler colonies of the British Empire, as well as from Britain itself. Organizers hoped that hosting the games every four years would exhibit Ireland's physical prowess and enthusiastic nationalism. Diminishing budgets hampered the games over the next decade, and because the competitions were largely associated with, and promoted by, the Free State government, the project did not survive the rise of Fianna Fáil. One [End Page 144] could easily dismiss the attempted revival of the Tailteann Games as a shortlived minor event in the history of Irish sport. In Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884–1938, however, Aidan Beatty persuasively examines the event within a much larger context; he repositions the games as a piece of a longer history of the conflation of Irish "national sovereignty and masculine strength." Gender analysis remains a rare commodity in political histories of Ireland; rarer still are studies that employ masculinity as a category for historical analysis. Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism corrects this oversight by placing masculine concerns at the center of the nationalist movement. Beatty demonstrates that, regardless of changes in state power and the varying dominance of political parties, the common denominator of Irish nationalism was the importance it placed on establishing and reinforcing Irish masculinity. Asserting the centrality of masculinity to Irish nationalism allows Beatty to place the revolutionary years into a wider framework, and in doing so, to undermine the very notion of a singular, watershed "Irish Revolution" by connecting the ideas and experiences of Irish nationalists across generations. To accomplish the goal of minimizing the "Irish Revolution," Beatty approaches his subject thematically. He begins with the revolutionary years (1916–1923) in chapter two, and asserts that questions of masculinity were central to each of the dramatic moments of those years. The next three chapters turn to the period before 1916, and the final two chapters shift the discussion to the years after the civil war. In examining such themes as space, land, or the body, each of these chapters uses the histories of organizations and political parties to provide topical focus. This deprioritizing of the revolutionary years allows Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism to connect the muscular vision of Irish nationalism promoted by the GAA in the 1880s (chapter 3), with Fianna Fáil's economic policies toward privately owned farms in the 1930's (chapter 6). This longue durée approach aligns Beatty's interpretation of Irish nationalism with the wider field of postcolonial studies, which seeks to demonstrate the long legacy of the colonial experience. This already ambitious work also seeks to escape the exceptionalism of what Beatty calls the "Irish Sonderweg" by comparing the connections between Irish nationalism and masculinity to similar intersections in other European and postcolonial contexts. In this case, Beatty takes the Zionist movement as his comparative example. Considering both the Irish and the European Jews as "quasi-colonial" peoples, he argues that comparing the two provides a "Zionist mirror" that can reveal many of the intricacies in the relationship between Irish nationalism and masculinity. This is an intriguing interpretive tack, but unfortunately, this comparative turn rarely adds to the study beyond confirming the unsurprising conclusion that ideas and practices in Ireland had analogs in the Zionist experience. In its role as "mirror," the Zionist story itself is not subject [End Page 145] to the same close examination as the Irish story. Beatty's consideration of moments when Zionism, or Jewishness, and Irish nationalism actually intersected result in more effective comparisons. A fine example of this is the third chapter's discussion of a 1924 political cartoon titled "Jew Regard for the Law," which appeared in Guth na Gharda ("The Policeman's...

The Irish Revolution and World History:Nation, Race, and Civilization in the Rhetoric of the Irish Revolutionary Generation Jason Knirck (bio) As the first Dáil was debating the wisdom of Irish support for the League of Nations, Deputy Terence MacSwiney arose and noted that "no League would be permanent if small and large nations were not admitted on equal terms. It could not be permanent if Germany and the neutral countries were not equally admitted. Ireland was the test case."1 At first glance this statement appears to be an example of Irish nationalist self-importance that verges on the ridiculous. Of all the issues that could bedevil the creation of the League of Nations, the status of Ireland seems rather far down the list. But if examined in the context of Irish revolutionary rhetoric about the rest of the world, the comment becomes more comprehensible. Sinn Féin took seriously President Wilson's language about self-determination and the rights of small nations, and thought that the postwar order would be based on a system of equality between large and small countries. As victims of British imperialism, Irish nationalists also anticipated the breakup of European empires in the wake of the First World War. Thus the creation of Dáil Éireann in Ireland, combined with the near-universal hope that the days of large empires were over—what one historian has dubbed "the Wilsonian moment"—led Sinn Féiners and other Irish revolutionaries to magnify Ireland's importance in [End Page 157] the coming postwar settlement.2 As a colonized region whose leaders considered it to be a small, European, civilized nation, Ireland did seem to be a suitable case to test the intentions of the victorious powers—in particular, the United States—in creating a postwar order based on equality, rational discussion, and decolonization. When MacSwiney made this comment in April 1919, President Wilson had already proven unsympathetic to the Irish case and to its Irish American representatives in Paris, and suspicion of American intent was already appearing in the ranks of Sinn Féin. Given how the revolutionary movement saw Ireland as a crucial contact zone between the old world and the new, empire and decolonization, Europeanness and ethnic difference, it seems less absurd that those same revolutionaries would seek to elevate the Irish case into a vital component of the postwar settlement. While nationalists in Vietnam, Egypt, and India undoubtedly thought the same about the positions of their respective countries, MacSwiney's comment reveals fundamental assumptions that many members of Sinn Féin made about the rest of the world and Ireland's primacy in it. Most of these assumptions rested on or were expressed through analogies to other situations that had arisen in imperial and world history. Analogies, of course, are always dangerous terrain for nationalists, as uniqueness is the fundamental assumption of any nationalism, but the perceived definitions of each unique nation also rest on implicit or explicit differences from other nations.3 Thus an argument from analogy risks either undermining the singularity of the nation or categorizing it with other nations in a way that jeopardizes the nation's self-image. De Valera recognized this as the Dáil was preparing to appoint plenipotentiaries to conduct negotiations in London in 1921. He declared, "Nothing disgusted him so much as introducing analogies when there was no analogy there. Their position was totally different to that of the American states or South Africa, and let them deal with plain facts."4 De Valera perhaps had particular reason to be [End Page 158] wary of analogies, having been burned politically by an ill-conceived attempt to compare Ireland to Cuba while touring the United States in 1920. Nevertheless, Irish revolutionaries often saw a need to place their country, themselves, and their revolution in a global context when defending, promoting, or evaluating their case. Recent historiography has exploded the notion that Irish nationalism was particularly insular, and the engagement of Irish nationalists with the rest of the world—particularly the colonized world—has become much better analyzed over the past decade or so. In particular, it has been shown that well before the revolutionary period "Irish...

Mathew Carey, “Protecting Duties,” and the Dublin Crowd in the Early 1780s* Eoin Magennis (bio) In 1827 Lady Morgan (formerly Sydney Owenson) published her novel The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale. The work focuses on Ireland in the 1790s but includes some details of incidents from an earlier decade centering on nonimportation and tarring and feathering. When one of the novel’s protagonists, Lord Charles Fitzpatrick, makes his first appearance at a Volunteer review, he is splattered with dust and mud and told, “you look as if you fell into the hands of the nonimportation confederates and were tarred and feathered after their most approved fashion.” Lord Charles is on his way with college friends to The Strugglers, a public house in Winetavern Street (near Christ Church Cathedral), where the owner is a “public-spirited tapster, a captain of Volunteers, a legislator, with a musket on his shoulder and a sword by his side; a papist; a defender of the faith, and a leader of the tarring-and-feathering bands.” He is accused of having tarred and feathered an English-made carriage, breaking windows of a shop in Dawson Street, and carrying off silk pieces because “it was not Irish poplin.” In chapter 5, “The Row,” Lady Morgan describes the scene at The Strugglers where “non-importation men” who were “returning from a tar-and-feathering adventure,” the military, Lord Charles, and the main protagonist Murrough O’Brien all cross paths in a riot. The author, in a line that could have come from Adam Smith, refers to the protectionist impulse as “the voluntary or [End Page 173] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The anger of manufacturers that no legislation for protecting duties would be passed by the Irish parliament is shown in this depiction of tarring and feathering from July 1784. The print also captured the American origins (America invenit) of the practice and the Irish use (Hibernia fecit) of it against those refusing to support nonimportation and nonconsumption agreements. “Tarring and Feathering: The Reward of the Enemies of Ireland,” Walker’s Hibernian Magazine (Dublin: R. Gibson, 1784). Copyright Trustees of the British Museum. [End Page 174] compulsory preference of dear or bad articles, of home manufacture, to better or cheaper articles brought from abroad.”1 Eight years before the novel’s publication, the Irish-born publisher and journalist Mathew Carey had plunged into the middle of a pamphlet war raging across the new American republic during the economic crisis, or “Panic,” of 1819.2 He had lived for over thirty years in Philadelphia by that point and had become an extremely successful publisher, bookseller, and philanthropist. The 1819 crisis saw a catastrophic slowdown in the staple cotton trade, the calling in of debts by nervous banks, a resultant credit squeeze, and a rash of bankruptcies, particularly in the south and west. The villains behind this near-collapse of the emerging republic’s economy were, in Carey’s eyes, Adam Smith and those American followers of the free-trade ideas contained in The Wealth of Nations. Instead, Carey was a champion of what became known as the American “protective doctrine” of the nineteenth century, a system of tariffs or duties on imports behind which manufacturing could grow. The connections, through Carey, between the “protective doctrine” and an earlier debate in Ireland in the 1780s have become clearer in recent years.3 Most newspapers in Dublin, including those on which Carey worked between 1778 and 1783—the Hibernian [End Page 175] Journal, the Freeman’s Journal, and particularly the radical Volunteers Journal that he edited between 1783 and 1784—all espoused, to a greater or lesser degree, ideas about nonimportation and the protection of Irish industries.4 However, Carey went further by supporting not only protecting duties but also a violent anti-importation campaign in Dublin in the spring and summer of 1784, and this led him to express doubts about the connection with Britain. This brought him into conflict with the administration in Dublin Castle and laid the ground for his flight to the new American republic in September 1784.5 This article describes how the actions of the Dublin...

Reverse Currents:Irish Feminist and Nationalist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and U.S. Anti-imperialism, 1916–24 Elizabeth McKillen (bio) During the easter rising of 1916, British troops arrested pacifist and suffragist Francis Sheehy Skeffington while he was out trying to prevent looting on Dublin streets, executed him without trial, and covered up their actions by burying him without notifying the family. They had apparently not counted on the indefatigable detective skills of Francis's wife Hanna, who soon used social networks and political skills cultivated during her career as a suffragist to uncover what happened to her husband. With the assistance of Sir Francis Vane, a sympathetic British officer, Hanna soon forced the arrest and court martial of Captain John Bowen-Colthurst, who had issued the command to execute Francis.1 She also traveled to Britain and convinced Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to launch a broader inquiry into the incident. Yet Sheehy Skeffington proved dissatisfied with the results of both the court martial and the inquiry, and she soon "made up [her] mind … to go to America and to tell [the] story of British militarism to every audience in the States that I could reach."2 Over the course of the next eight years, Sheehy Skeffington spent extensive time in the United States on lecture and fundraising tours on behalf of Irish independence; she also published widely in the [End Page 148] American and Irish American press. Sheehy Skeffington's roles in shaping the Irish nationalist and suffrage movements during this period have received significant scholarly attention, but this article seeks to shed new light on her activism by exploring the ways that she contributed to intellectual currents within both Irish America and the American left on questions of imperialism and U.S. foreign policy.3 Erez Manela in his classic book The Wilsonian Moment emphasized the importance of a transnational flow of Wilsonian ideas about national self-determination in inspiring anticolonial rebellions in such diverse countries as China, Egypt, India, and Korea during the World War I era. Yet, as subaltern theorists have recently insisted, the intellectual flow of ideas was often a two-way street, and marginalized actors from colonial areas sometimes exercised surprising influence over larger and more powerful nations by using their institutions, media, and diaspora networks to disseminate their own ideas.4 For no group was this more true than the early twentieth-century Irish, who enjoyed the benefits of a sprawling and politically influential Irish immigrant community in the United States. An older literature on Irish America detailed the efforts of its leaders and politicians to shape U.S. foreign policy formulation with respect to Ireland and explored some of the disagreements that developed between Irish American nationalist leaders and visiting Irish male rebels such as Eamon de Valera.5 The role of Irish women lecturers [End Page 149] who came to the United States in the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion, however, has only recently received attention. To date, most studies of women lecturers have focused on their success in raising funds for the Irish rebellion and in publicizing the Irish nationalist struggle. Some have also detailed the ways in which these women interacted with Irish American women and encouraged an expansion of female organizational activities within Irish America. Catherine Burns has explored the ways in which both Irish and Irish American women used American patriotic rhetoric to justify their Irish nationalist work. The contributions of Irish women lecturers to ongoing debates about key U.S. foreign policies, however, remain largely neglected.6 Yet many Irish female lecturers, Sheehy Skeffington included, remained in the United States for long periods of time [End Page 150] and proved to be quite popular speakers and political strategists. Although both Irish and Irish American women nationalists emphasized their loyalty to the United States, U.S. intelligence agents engaged in extensive surveillance of their activities because they feared their subversive influence in undermining U.S. foreign policies.7 Sheehy Skeffington's aim during her first lecture tour in 1917–18 was primarily to expose British brutality and raise funds for Irish independence, but her lectures intersected and clashed with President Wilson's policies during World War...

"The Children of the Nation?":Representations of Poor Children in Mainstream Nationalist Journalism, 1882 and 1913 Margot Gayle Backus (bio) In his novel A Star Called Henry (1999), Roddy Doyle has his fictional protagonist Henry Smart, a fourteen-year-old Irish Citizen Army volunteer, ask the socialist labor organizer and Easter Rising leader James Connolly to add something to the founding document of the Irish state, the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, "about the rights of children." This invention invites readers to consider that the Proclamation's famous commitment to "cherish all the children of the nation equally" might have been intended and understood, by at least some of the Rising's participants, as not merely symbolic but as a commitment to actual children. This move [End Page 118] on Doyle's part intervenes, perhaps deliberately, in a debate among literary critics about the significance of child imagery in early-twentieth-century Irish nationalist writing. Some critics view the use of such child metaphors as a necessary and empowering rhetorical move that presented Irish nationalists, rather than the nation itself, long personified as Mother Ireland, as the agents of national destiny, while others dismiss or decry them as infantilizing the Irish and naturalizing their domination by the British.1 Critical analyses of modern Irish nationalism's representations of children have typically focused on these images' symbolic dimension, while the significance of these representations as expressions of attitudes toward real children have been largely ignored. Doyle's imagined exchange between James Connolly and a juvenile Citizen Army volunteer, whom the reader has seen grow up homeless on the streets of Dublin, makes suddenly self-evident an alternative reading: that in a society in which vast hordes of homeless children subsisted or died under the most marginal of circumstances, some of those who fought to establish an independent Ireland would have had the welfare of literal children as a high priority.2 For such readers, the key phrase "all Ireland's children" would have emphasized class disparities among literal children rather than metaphorical divisions among Ireland's religious and political factions. [End Page 119] That the Easter Proclamation's child imagery almost surely was read by some nationalists as primarily literal and by others as metaphorical can be explained by notable changes in nationalist representations of children that this article traces in the coverage of the 1913 Lockout by the nationalist newspaper of record, the Freeman's Journal. It argues that during this period, the editors, writers, and artists of the Freeman's Journal increasingly deployed representations of poor children that could be read as simultaneously symbolic and literal, so as to de-emphasize a series of material and predominantly class-based conflicts within the nationalist front. Over its history, the Freeman's Journal, published in Dublin from 1763 to 1924, consistently represented the interests of the most economically and politically powerful caste to claim nationalist credentials, while at the same time presenting those interests as those of the nationalist movement as a whole.3 Originally established as a mouthpiece for the Protestant "Patriot" movement, the Freeman's Journal was nominally nonsectarian up to the Land Wars in the late nineteenth century. By 1877, however, the personal conversion to Catholicism of the Freeman's editor, Edmund Dwyer Gray, was matched by the gradual conversion of his newspaper to a conservative nationalism that identified Ireland's interests with those of the Catholic hierarchy and the economic requirements of a bourgeoning Catholic middle class.4 These shifts in the paper's editorial positions and reporting took place in a context of competition among nationalist factions and newspapers. To maintain its readership, the Freeman's Journal at times allied itself with more progressive elements within the nationalist front. For instance, in the early 1880s, when its star reporter, William O'Brien, left the paper to become founding editor of the Land League's new weekly newspaper, the United Ireland, the Freeman's Journal reined in its opposition to Parnell's leadership so as not to lose circulation to the new publication.5 Similar pressures would [End Page 120] later drive the Freeman's Journal's editorial policy to the right, away from the interests...

"Diversity," "Radical Roots," "Transformation," "Disturbing the Peace," "Loose Change"--the titles of past presidential addresses to the American Studies Association invoked inspired challenges to the status quo, to the conventional, to what passed and passes for common sense. In addition to these creative provocations and imagined transformations, my predecessors took stock of the current state of American studies, intellectually and institutionally. I shall try to follow their lead. My own engagement with American studies dates from my days as a graduate student in the American Civilization Program at New York University. Already the field I encountered in the late 1960s was not, if it ever had been, the monolithic American studies described by Jesse Lemisch as a triumphant exceptionalism, celebrating the United States' supposed "unity, consensus, classlessness, lack of conflict." 1 True, in the courses that I took with Paul Baker, who fifteen years later would be with Charles Bassett the first recipient of the Mary Turpie Award, we were still reading Gabriel, Tyler, Curti, and Matthiessen. These were the magisterial texts that Linda Kerber, in her presidential address eleven years ago, cited as typical of the post-World War II curriculum. But we did not swim entirely in these Olympian waters. Concurrently with Matthiessen's formalist analyses, stocked with the traditional [End Page 1] literary colossi, we spent time with Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore, precursor of the new historicism. There we met up with Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Fitzhugh, Charlotte Forten, Ulysses Grant, and Mary Chesnut. Meanwhile, Constance Rourke guided us through the subterranean riches of American Humor, where legends, folktales, and stock characters were for Rourke what MTV, Harlequin romances, and skateboarding would become for today's cultural studies. And also beyond what then constituted the canon, we engaged the likes of Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, W. E. B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk, and Randolph Bourne's essays in the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Seven Arts. For me reading Bourne had the most immediate impact. At least four collections of Bourne's essays appeared as America's involvement in Vietnam escalated. It was Lillian Schlissel's richly evocative The World of Randolph Bourne that determined me upon my course. I would write my master's essay on Bourne, arguing for his contemporary relevance. Bourne's impassioned opposition to the entry of the United States into World War I resonated most powerfully with the times. But his personae also included Bourne the educational reformer who wanted the nation's schools to teach students to claim learning for themselves; Bourne the cosmopolitan idealist, who celebrated a "Trans-National America" based on diversity and multiple identities; and Bourne the cultural revolutionary, who looked with equal skepticism on the "genteel tradition" and the New Humanism, calling instead for an indigenous literature that spoke from and to the experiences of all Americans. Today, nearly three decades later, I see more clearly that Bourne's expansiveness had real if predictable limits--his transnationalism included only ethnic Americans of European origin, his indigenous literature was entirely white and almost exclusively male. But I still insist that Bourne has much value. I hear echoes of this self-styled "literary radical" in those who celebrate experimentation in music, painting, and architecture, in those who call for historical and literary canons more in keeping with a multicultural America, and in those who make explicit the connection between culture and politics. Several of my predecessors have remarked upon the transformative impact of American studies that my personal history also illustrates. Making the boundary into the center, as Michael Cowan has labeled our project, freed us to choose from a variety of self-definitions and [End Page 2] theoretical locations available on the periphery. In contrast to academic colleagues who follow only one well-trod disciplinary route, we can choose to be "'multidisciplinary,' 'anti-disciplinary...

The "Public Child" and the Reluctant State? Robbie Gilligan (bio) This essay explores the Irish state's response to the "public child." It assesses the available evidence and argues ultimately that the Irish state has been reluctant at best, negligent at worst, in its response to the needs of the "public child." The term "public child," as used here, refers to a child whose private world has in some sense become public business, attracting attention because concern has been aroused about his or her care or safety.1 The nature of this concern eventually leads the apparatus of state control, governmental or nongovernmental, to intervene, often placing the child in the care of the state, away from its home and the care of its parents.2 In earlier decades, this apparatus of control might have operated in civil society at least partly through the work of nongovernmental organizations, [End Page 265] such as the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC) or through the efforts of concerned citizens.3 In recent decades, this apparatus has become more the remit of state systems, such as statutory child protection, social work services, or the Garda Síochána.4 Thus, the state has become increasingly involved not just in regulating the basis of intervention at the more serious end of the spectrum of child protection but also very often in delivering that intervention. The "public child" in the context of this discussion lives away from home, on foot of state intervention with or without parental consent.5 This essay also considers evidence on the experience of the "private child" and the "adopted child" to throw further light on the fate of the "public child." The "private child" lives within its family structure of whatever form, largely untouched by troubles that might bring him or her onto the radar screen of state surveillance systems. The "adopted child" is raised in its adoptive family home following an adoption order in accordance with state legislation. Legal adoption came late to the Republic of Ireland, only having been introduced as recently as 1952.6 In at least some instances, it [End Page 266] might be argued that domestic adoption serves the function, among others, of transforming a "public child" or a potential "public child" into a "private child."7 Unlike the private or adopted child, the public child's marginal status meant that it lacked sufficient advocacy on its behalf in the political or policy world. In terms of time frame, this essay focuses on the period since the publication of the Reformatory and Industrial Schools Systems Report, 1970—hereafter referred to by its more popular name, the Kennedy Report—although reference will be made to earlier developments where these help to explain later trends.8 The second part of the essay's title refers to the "reluctant state." Even a minimalist understanding of the state's role in comparative social welfare suggests three key areas of responsibility for child protective services: the enacting of legislation, the funding of activity to at least some basic level, and the monitoring of compliance with legal standards or funding conditions. Using evidence from these three areas of activity, this essay argues that the Irish state can indeed be classified as "reluctant" in its dealings with the "public child." The role of the state in relation to the "public child" will, moreover, be explored through four relevant lenses: residential care, foster care, adoption, and community supports, namely measures that might preempt the need to make care of the child a public responsibility.9 [End Page 267] Residential Care Given the plethora of media attention since the mid-1990s to child abuse scandals involving the state's industrial and reformatory schools, in the public mind residential care is probably the form of provision most associated with the "public child." Residential care refers to care provided in institutional or nonfamilial settings, such as in industrial schools, reformatory institutions, or orphanages.10 Prior to 1970, these settings were generally large and forbidding institutions, but with subsequent reform, now tend to be smaller in scale.11 Reflecting the spirit and the recommendations of the Kennedy Report, these newer settings are more...

Reviewed by: Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 Sarah F. Williams Fumerton, Patricia, Anita Guerrini, and Kris McAbee, eds. Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2010. 374 pp. Early modern English broadside ballads hovered between oral and print traditions, text and song, artifact and performance, high and low entertainment, and truth and fiction. The chapters in this diverse collection engage with the liminality of ballad culture from 1500 to 1800 in England and the New World. The result is conscientious interdisciplinary methodologies that engage with the histories of art, literature, music, and popular culture. Organized into five parts, the fifteen essays explore such broad topics as collecting and interpreting ballads, monstrosity and journalism, criminal subjects, class and authorship, and ballads in the New World. Introducing the opening section on collecting practices and historiography, Fumerton's chapter, entitled "Remembering by Dismembering: Databases, Archiving, and the Recollection of Seventeenth-Century Broadside Ballads," exposes the collecting practices of antiquarians such as Samuel Pepys. Pepys and others often physically altered broadside sheets, even reordering the stanzas and ornaments themselves. Fumerton concludes the modern searchable electronic database, with its "dismembered" and fragmentary vision of the past, is very much like the shuffling, trimming, and rearranging of seventeenth-century collectors. Patricia McDowell's "'The Art of Printing was Fatal': Print Commerce and the Idea of Oral Tradition in Long Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse" continues this conversation by problematizing the origins of eighteenth-century ballad scholarship and the collecting habits of Thomas Percy and Joseph Ritson. She exposes their valorization of oral ballads, as opposed to print, and their exclusion of particularly vulgar examples. Finally, in "Child's Ballads and the Broadside Conundrum" Mary Ellen Brown explores the compilation, categorization, and institutionalization of Francis Child's ballads, as well as his reliance, though unacknowledged, on printed versions of the oral tradition he valued. Seventeenth century broadside-buying audiences were fascinated by the monstrous and strange. Thomas Pettitt examines journalistic accounts of the murdered sweetheart alongside more conventional narrations in oral ballad formats. Tassie Gniady also compares narratives between the broadside and oral ballad genres when she examines accounts of the "hog-faced woman," a Dutch immigrant named Tannakin Skinker, who became a sensation in London's cheap print trade. Gniady posits that Skinker narratives functioned as a forum through which early moderns worked out their political and social anxieties about women, the nature of the human, and the economic [End Page 4] rivalry between England and the Netherlands. Co-editor Anita Guerrini concludes this section on monstrosities by engaging with the language employed in broadside advertisements of human anomalies. She concludes that these advertisements exhibit the shifting sensibilities toward curiosities at the turn of the eighteenth century—that is, new "scientific" language exists simultaneously with descriptions used earlier in the century for wonders. Crime narratives were as popular as tales of wonder and the monstrous in the early modern era. Simone Chess examines the cautionary tales of murderous wives and the intentional oaths, or speech acts, they make before killing their husbands. These women's promises become perverted versions of not only their marriage vows but also legitimate male oaths. Frances Dolan also engages with husband-murdering wives in her essay on petty traitors as she examines the use of ballads as evidence. Utilizing a wide array of genres—broadsides, pamphlets, court records, and dramatic works—across several decades, Dolan questions the very notion of truth as no single source or genre can truly provide the entire picture of a single event. Many of the murderous wife broadsides are "good-night ballads," a convention wherein the text reads as the voice of the condemned. Joy Wiltenburg examines these types of moralizing broadsides for the language of emotional expression and marks a shift in attention away from the victim and toward the criminal, thus humanizing the condemned. The problem of authorship is a slippery subject in broadside ballad scholarship. Steven Newman examines a particularly vulgar mid-eighteenth-century ballad "The Maiden's Bloody Garland" and the mystery surrounding its probable author, elite poet Thomas Warton. Like Guerrini and McDowell's essays, Newman finds that the interaction between popular and learned is symbiotic. This...

Reviewed by Robert M. Sandow Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania The Ongoing Civil War: New Versions of Old Stories. Edited by Herman Hattaway and Ethan S. Rafuse. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Pp.164. Cloth, $32.50.) This collection of essays provides a representative sample of articles that appeared in the short-lived journal Columbiad: A Quarterly Review of the War Between the States. Throughout its four year history, the guiding principle of the Columbiad was to couple the standards of the trained historian with a style that appealed to general readers. [End Page 426] As Mark Grimsley points out in "The Professional Historian and 'Popular History,'" the harmonizing goal of Columbiad often evokes ambivalence if not outright hostility on the part of scholars. His contemplative article traces the rise of the popular history genre in America and the condescending response by the guardians of "scientific history." Grimsley encourages historians to praise any effort that enhances their influence over the way general readers understand the past. If academics shirk this social responsibility, they abandon their role as shapers of public memory, leaving this important work in the hands of untrained enthusiasts. Dominated by practicing historians, the essays in this volume pay homage to academic rigor. A number also serve as instructive models of historical empiricism weighing interpretations against evidence. Historians in the field may not consider these works path-breaking but general readers will be rewarded by the book's more positive aspects. It presents recent scholarly approaches and reevaluates figures often maligned or under-appreciated in popular history. Lay-readers will notice a shift away from battlefields and military biography. One effective theme focuses on the significance of wartime administration and logistics, casting bureaucrats and intelligence officers as the unsung heroes of the conflict. William A. Tidwell's "Before the Wilderness: What Lee Knew" pieces together and evaluates the patchwork of the little-known Confederate intelligence. He asserts that in spring 1864 Lee had an effective understanding of Union army operational plans and developed the Wilderness attack as a rational counter. In a similar fashion, two essays on Union administration and logistics suggest that Northern victory resulted in large part from West Point professionalism and bureaucratic management. Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones praise the dour Henry W. Halleck for his ability to deflect political pressures while running the Union war machine with an engineer's attention to detail. Mark A. Snell adds Halleck's departmental chiefs to the list of able administrators. Several essays reexamine wartime figures, such as the unappealing former president Franklin Pierce and the ever-controversial George B. McClellan. While McClellan may be perennially damned in and out of academia, Ethan S. Rafuse presents a sympathetic portrait of McClellan on his own terms. Rafuse attempts valiantly to exorcise McClellan's demons by depicting him as a pragmatic general keenly in tune with political and military realities. He argues that McClellan's conservative strategy was the product of the West Point curriculum and echoed the fundamental tenets of Napoleon's most influential interpreter, Carl von Clausewitz. Despite the work's positive aspects, it exhibits significant unevenness. It is not bound together by a coherent theme or guiding focus and the title of the book as [End Page 427] well as the essays are somewhat enigmatic. Rafuse's "McClellan, von Clausewitz, and the Politics of War" admits that there is no evidence McClellan ever read or was influenced by von Clausewitz. Michael J. C. Taylor's "Franklin Pierce and the Civil War" is a mysterious title for an essay that fails to satisfy any type of reader. If engaging a non-academic audience is the goal, several of the articles fall flat or go against the grain of popular interest. They labor over individuals condemned or ignored in popular history, Halleck and McClellan included. Albert Castel's "History in Hindsight: William T. Sherman and Sooy Smith" looks again at one of Sherman's less-gifted subordinates leaving an impression that the...

Women’s Lives in a Spanish-Texas Community: San Antonio de Béxar, 1718–1821 Jesús F. de la Teja (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Béxar’s women enjoyed a full social life and, under certain circumstances, a public economic life as well. The woman at the center of scene might well be operating a cantina in her home—note the crosses, toys, and household items hanging on the walls—while the young woman on the right, possibly a family member or criada (servant, but literally “raised” or “brought up”) helps with the seemingly perpetual task of making tortillas, while the woman at the lower left holds a child in her arms. General Research Division, The New York Public Library. “Trajes mexicanos, un Fandango = Costumes mexicains = Mexican dresses.” New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-16b9-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 [Accessed Aug. 24, 2022]. [End Page 332] Jane Long is not the mother of Texas, although that is how she was identified at least by the 1870s, and that is how she has been depicted in Texas history books for over a century.1 Former U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison repeated this sobriquet in her book, Unflinching Courage: Pioneering Women Who Shaped Texas, which does not include a single Tejana2 or American Indian female. One look at Hutchison’s bibliography tells the story; it does not even list Teresa Palomo Acosta and Ruthe Winegarten’s Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History, published by the University of Texas Press in 2003. Hutchison’s myopia is neither new nor surprising. She represents a vision of what it means to be Texan and sends a very particular message (although one with fewer and fewer adherents all the time): that Jane Long could be the mother of Texas because only Anglo [End Page 333] women are really Texan. While most historians in the academy long ago abandoned this myopic perspective, it remains entrenched in the state’s popular history.3 But history is also driven by the record, and traditional use of the archival record has not been kind to borderlands women generally and Indigenous and Hispanic4 women specifically. Records have been most plentiful about the actions of public men doing public things. Records of statecraft, business, and religion are dominated by the presence of men, who since the time that history became a formal part of the academy have also been its principal writers. Men are also much more abundant in government and legal records, so when historians have looked at social and cultural themes, they have been conditioned to see men first. With the professionalization of history in the nineteenth century and men dominating the academy, historical research and writing became a principally male endeavor, and women and their actions and roles, already poorly represented in many types of records, fell by the wayside. This male-dominated landscape has undergone a substantial transformation in the last half-century, particularly with regard to more recent history, but the farther back in time one looks, the more difficult it becomes to center women in historical narratives.5 Spanish Texas is a particularly good example of how unkind the historical record can be to women’s history, although the situation extends throughout the borderlands. Few local records (where women would be most likely to be found) survive for the province’s first capital, Nuestra Señora de los Adaes, now a historical site in western Louisiana. As Francis [End Page 334] Galán points out, “The women of Los Adaes evidently did not leave behind any wills during the fort’s existence.”6 Likewise, there is almost a complete dearth of local records for La Bahía del Espíritu Santo, now Goliad, and for Nacogdoches. For those places the bulk of the surviving documentation addresses government and military matters and the activities of missionaries. Only San Antonio of the original Spanish Texas communities has a fairly extensive set of local sacramental, legal, and administrative records from which colonial-era gender issues can be identified and analyzed.7 As Donald Chipman and Harriett Denise Joseph note in their one chapter...