Citizen Army Research Articles

A Slightly Revolutionary Party: Labour and Parliamentary Politics in the Early Free State

A Slightly Revolutionary Party:Labour and Parliamentary Politics in the Early Free State Jason Knirck In the run-up to the 1922 Dáil election, the first conducted after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, a Labour newspaper warned voters that, "No matter what is happening don't let anything discourage you. We are a young party and to a great extent we are unskilled in electioneering. We shall make blunders—many of them and often, too, and some of them may be so serious as to be fatal."1 This statement, which echoed Pearse's famous declaration that the Volunteers may mistakenly shoot the wrong people at first, both lowered expectations for the fledgling party and reminded voters of its decidedly non- parliamentary roots. Much of the historical analysis of the Labour Party's parliamentary launch has focused on its electoral failures and its unwillingness to articulate a radical message, but the party actually played a crucial role in the creation and steadying of Irish democracy, despite its paucity of deputies. For one thing, the party's participation in the post-revolutionary Dáils during the abstention of anti-Treatyites provided greater legitimacy to the parliament as a representative multiparty body. Labour also took on the role of a broad opposition party, ranging beyond its staple socioeconomic issues to criticize the government on its foreign policy, its record on civil liberties, and its commitment to democracy. In accepting the Treaty but opposing the government, Labour modeled the notion of a loyal opposition. This feature had been noticeably absent from Irish politics in previous decades, with the Irish Party seeking to secede from Westminster and the Sinn Féin leadership frowning on open dissent during the revolution. The development of a loyal opposition normalized parliamentary behavior and routinely forced the government to defend its policies in the Dáil. In addition, the presence of a loyal opposition helped to separate Ireland from other new European countries in the 1920s that had left- and right-wing parties [End Page 39] openly seeking to destroy democratic states. Without a true foil for Cumann na nGaedheal in the Dáil during the anti-Treatyites' abstention, it is difficult to see how democracy could have taken root in Ireland as quickly as it did. Labour was the only party that could fulfill this function: the Farmers only opposed the government on a small number of issues, and the independents were too disparate to effectively mimic a party. After some Labour elements supported James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army in 1916, Labour stayed on the political sidelines during the 1918 and 1921 elections. A divided party decided to enter the parliamentary fray in 1922, but party leaders expressed significant reservations about the future and efficacy of parliamentary government. The civil war deepened Labour's commitment to electoral democracy, as it found itself defending the authority of the Dáil against both republican abstention and violence and Cumann na nGaedheal authoritarianism. In making this transition—in essence, a shift from the policies of Connolly to those of Thomas Johnson—Labour had to carve out a role for itself in the Dáil that bridged Labour skepticism of parliamentary politics, a desire to make inroads into Sinn Féin electoral dominance, and the artificial situation created by anti-Treatyite abstention. The ways in which Labour did this reveal much about the political assumptions of Labour and the fragility of democracy in the early Free State. ________ More than forty years ago, Brian Farrell authored a seminal study of the founding of Dáil Éireann and concluded that Ireland had a well-developed parliamentary tradition and that the Rising and the revolution did little to shake the faith of the Irish political class in democratic and parliamentary institutions.2 Tom Garvin, most particularly in 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy (2005), identified a number of key elements that augmented this democratic tradition, including the support of the Catholic church (unlike in Italy and France), the partial prerevolutionary settlement of the land question, and the fact that Partition had homogenized the Free State religiously and culturally.3 Despite the presence of these enabling factors, Garvin concludes that...

States + War + Movements = Repression

Sidney Tarrow. (2015). War, States, & Contention: A Comparative Historical Study. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, xiv + 314 pp., $27.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-5317-5). Sidney Tarrow has written a rich, insightful, and depressing book. In tracing the interplay between war, state-making, and popular movements across European and American history, he shows how states have generally emerged ever stronger and more controlling over time. Tarrow’s latest work is inspired by his long relationship with Charles Tilly, as co-author and joint researcher. Tarrow noted a major gap in Tilly’s work: while Tilly had developed a theory of how war contributed to state-making, and had written extensively on social movements, Tilly had not linked the two strands of work. Tarrow, however, shows that wars produce movements and movements produce wars, and that state-making is profoundly shaped by the movements that produce wars or result from them. Tarrow begins by looking at two major historical episodes in which movements led to wars, and one in which war produced a state-changing movement. The first case is France and its revolutionary wars. The movements to rationalize the French monarchy’s web of tax and status laws and to limit absolute state and church authority in 18th-century France eventually led to the French Revolution. The revolutionary change of regime then spurred two kinds of wars. The first was an international war, as other European states reacted to the anti-aristocratic character of the new regime and the revolutionaries sought to protect and extend their new domain of liberty. The second was a civil war, inflaming regions where the nationalist and centralizing actions of the revolutionary government clashed with local pro-clerical, regionalist, and traditionalist views. Tarrow makes much of the well-known contradictions of the Revolution: that the new regime with its claims of equality and liberty for all citizens was able to raise an ideologically inspired mass citizen army, which swept through all the aristocratically structured militaries … jgoldsto{at}gmu.edu

Cumann na mBan & Women in Irish Republican Paramilitary Organisations, 1969-1986

1. Introduction The year 2014 marked centenary of founding Cumann na mBan, Irish Republican women's organisation. On April 5, 1914, over 100 women attended a meeting of what was to become Cumann na mBan in Wynn's Hotel, Dublin, presided over by Agnes O'Farrelly. The formation of a Republican women's organisation succeeded founding of male-only Irish Volunteers. The organisation played an active role during 1916 rising, although it had split less than two years earlier into pro- and anti-Redmond factions. (1) Since members of Cumann na mBan were not allowed to carry weapons, some of their activists joined ranks of James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army to take an active part in fighting. The group reorganised following Rising, establishing hundreds of branches in all 32 Counties of Ireland as well as abroad. Nonetheless, during Treaty debates, Cumann na mBan split again. Thereupon, end of civil war marks beginning of a weakening of organisation. A few years later, again, a significant section followed Constance Markievicz and Eamonn de Valera into 1926-formed Fianna Fail party (Conlon1969; Matthews 2010 & 2012; McCarthy 2007; Ni Chathmhaoil and Reinisch 2014; Ward 1983: 119-247). While first decade of its existence was most active and most influential in history of Cumann na mBan, organisation continued to play a significant role in Republican Movement in later decades. Regardless of their activism in Republican Movement, official commemorations marking centenary of Cumann na mBan neglect existence of women's organisation in these later decades. Indeed unsurprisingly, Mary McAuliffe's memorial address at Glasnevin Cemetery ends with decline of Cumann na mBan in 1923. (2) Additionally, it has been claimed that Cumann na mBan ceased to exist during 1970s and 1980s. This claim was first raised in an Irish News article back in 1993 and was subsequently strongly opposed by Cumann na mBan at that time. (Ni Chathmhaoil and Reinisch 2014: 102f.) It was repeated in a report about Cumann na mBan centenary event in paper An Phoblacht/Republican News in April 2014. (3) * * Certainly, only few researchers acknowledge contribution by Cumann na mBan to Republican Movement during recent conflict in North of Ireland. One of these is Theresa O'Keefe. In a recently published study on Republican feminism, she argues: Nonetheless, over years Cumann na mBan had become an autonomous body, adopting its own constitution and engaging in its own military activities. There remained, however, a high level of cooperation between Cumann na mBan and [Irish Republican] Army. Often they worked on same assignment under direction of leadership of IRA (O'Keefe 2013: 92). While O'Keefe's study is an important contribution to Republican women's activism and Republican feminism in North of Ireland, it provides little data on Cumann na mBan itself. In light of this, my article will go further and provide additional data collected through extensive interviews with former and current activists of Cumann na mBan. These data will provide students of contemporary Irish and British history with a clear understanding of who women were that formed Cumann na mBan during so-called Troubles. The conflict in North of Ireland is not only longest war waged in Western hemisphere since 1945 but, according to John Whyte, region is the most heavily researched area on earth (1991: viii). Although this may be true, Republican women have long been neglected by researchers. As a result, Cumann na mBan during this period is largely missing from literature and most of books and articles on recent Irish Republican organisations have not dealt with Cumann n mBan in any depth at all. Contrary, for many years, role played by women in Irish politics and, in particular, Cumann na mBan was neglected. …

Captain Jack White: Imperialism, Anarchism and the Irish Citizen Army by Leo Keohane (review)

Captain Jack White: Imperialism, Anarchism and the Irish Citizen Army by Leo Keohane (review)

A Citizen Army for Science: Quantifying the Contributions of Citizen Scientists to our Understanding of Monarch Butterfly Biology

The first monarch citizen science program was launched in the 1950s and, since then, thousands of volunteers have made fundamental contributions to our accumulating knowledge of monarch biology. We quantified these efforts and the degree to which citizen science has contributed to monarch scholarship. We estimate that, in 2011, volunteers spent over 72,000 hours collecting data useful for monarch research. Of 503 monarch-focused research publications in which new results were presented from 1940 to 2014, 17% used citizen science data. We address persistent gaps in the use and coverage of these data and show that, despite a typical view of volunteers as mere data collectors for scientists, many citizens are deeply engaged in all aspects of monarch research and data use. Finally, we argue that monarchs provide a model system for understanding the impacts of citizen science on scholarship, public engagement, and conservation.

Military history a century after the Great War

The parameters and issues of British military history of the First World War were largely set in the war’s immediate aftermath. By the 1930s soldiers and statesmen had argued the pros and cons of Britain’s strategy of ‘continental commitment’ – raising a mass citizen army to fight in France and Flanders alongside Britain’s French ally, rather than pursuing a more traditional maritime strategy. Since the 1960s the men who went to war have been studied by social and cultural historians, althoug...

Socialist Republican Discourse and the 1916 Easter Rising: The Occupation of Jacob's Biscuit Factory and the South Dublin Union Explained

AbstractThe events of the Easter Rising have been subjected to extensive analysis by historians who have focused on military strategy as a means of explaining the occupation of specific sites. However, Jacob's Biscuit Factory and the South Dublin Union have proven resistant to this paradigm. The political value of both places can be understood by giving close attention to the long history of antagonism between these two institutions and the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, out of which the Irish Citizen Army that fought in the rising was formed. In his articles for theIrish WorkerandWorkers' Republic, James Connolly adapted traditional republican discourse of economic emancipation through political sovereignty to address a contemporary urban context. An understanding of the way that this discourse functioned facilitates an understanding of the role of Jacob's Biscuit Factory and the South Dublin Union in the Easter Rising: as sites of actual and symbolic liberation. This analysis of popular discourse in the contemporary press offers a new approach to the study of events that have been termed the Irish Revolution, and it presents a model for understanding the way that republican discourse accommodated the very different political objectives of Irish separatists.

On Political Power and Personal Liberty in The Prince and The Discourses

While The Prince addresses the single power-seeker who aspires to rule a principality and The Discourses speak to the few deemed worthy of governing a republic, both texts also take into consideration those who want to be free of the harmful effects of the State, regardless of the form it may take. The starting point of this paper, therefore, is Machiavelli's most basic grouping of humanity into those who crave power over others and those who desire not to be oppressed. What do Machiavelli's ideas about state formation, the role of the ruler, conspiracies, war and citizen armies, taxes, fortresses, and property rights have to contribute to the perennial question of political power versus personal liberty?

Re-Imagining the Place and Time of Communism Today: Between Hardt's “New Love” and Jameson's “Citizen Army”

Re-Imagining the Place and Time of Communism Today: Between Hardt's “New Love” and Jameson's “Citizen Army”

Private Military and Security Companies and the Liberal Conception of Violence

The institution of war is the broad framework of rules, norms, and organizations dedicated to the prevention, prosecution, and resolution of violent conflict between political entities. Important parts of that institution consist of the accountability arrangements that hold between armed forces, the political leaders who oversee and direct the use of those forces, and the people in whose name the leaders act and from whose ranks the members of the armed forces are drawn. Like other parts of the institution, these arrangements are responsive to changes in military technology and needs, to geopolitical facts, and to moral and political norms. In particular, they are sensitive to the forms that military organization takes. Since the emergence of modern states in Europe some 500 years ago, there have been three main such forms: private providers—in the form of mercenaries, in early modern Europe—then professional standing armies, which in turn developed into citizen armies. Although elements of the three organizations have coexisted in many armies, the citizen army model has dominated until recently. That model brought with it a particular conception of the accountability relations between the army, the state, and the people. The state had authority over and directed the army, which was accountable to it. In turn the state was accountable for its use of the army to the people, on whose behalf it acted. The dominance of state authority over the military is now under strain, with the professional and private elements—in the form of private military and security companies (PMSCs)—having increasing importance. As those elements increase in power and presence, so it becomes more difficult to make the state accountable to the people for its use of the military, and more difficult for the people to act as a restraining force on the way in which the military used. In this essay, I outline and assess these developments—with particular emphasis on the emergence of PMSCs—in the light of a liberal view of (political) violence. The essay focuses on the situation in the United States, which possesses by far the most important military force in the world today, and in which the use of PMSCs is most developed. The paper has three main sections and a brief conclusion: the first section sketches the liberal view of violence and its implications for organizations dedicated to its use; the second outlines the salient characteristics of the three historically dominant forms of armies; and the third looks at the current situation in which the three forms coexist uneasily.

Book Review: The New Citizen Armies: Israel’s Armed Forces in Comparative Perspective

Book Review: The New Citizen Armies: Israel’s Armed Forces in Comparative Perspective

The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory , and: A Chickamauga Memorial: The Establishment of America's First Civil War National Military Park (review)

Reviewed by: The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory, and: A Chickamauga Memorial: The Establishment of America's First Civil War National Military Park Susan-Mary Grant (bio) The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory. By Robert Hunt. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Pp. 192. Cloth, $36.00.) A Chickamauga Memorial: The Establishment of America's First Civil War National Military Park. By Timothy B. Smith. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Pp. 240. Cloth, $43.00.) The real Civil War, according to Walt Whitman, was never likely to get into the books, and for many historians that has held true, even if the volumes in question are memoirs; perhaps especially if the volumes in question are memoirs. We are at a point in the historiography of the Civil War where, so glutted are we by firsthand contemporary letters, diaries, dispatches, and newspapers, we are in danger of dismissing firsthand accounts written after the fact. And yet, at the same time, we are fascinated by the idea of Civil War memory, even though we too often position it as a false memory, one constructed within the context of a postwar national (or indeed sectional) narrative driven by a combined political and racial imperative, to which was often added a hefty dose of sentimentality, to make the war [End Page 295] seem better or worse than it actually was. Better, worse, and, above all, real are, of course, relative terms, and in the case of a civil war this is especially so. In war, one person's victory is always another's defeat; in a civil conflict, that leaves the nation, if it survives, in a bit of a quandary. In the case of the American Civil War, that quandary was exacerbated by the fact that the nation did survive, but slavery did not. And in "the question of what counts as real," Robert Hunt proposes in The Good Men Who Won the War, "lies the key to the Cumberland writers' memory of emancipation" (2). Hunt's is a relatively trim and tidy study, but it certainly packs a punch. It utilizes the personal memoirs of Army of the Cumberland veterans alongside their regimental histories "to evaluate how the authors included emancipation in their interpretation of the North's victory in the Civil War" (1). The choice of the Army of the Cumberland as the lens through which to refract the multitude of memories and the meanings applied by and to them is an excellent one. Certainly for Hunt, who has long worked in Tennessee, it was, he admits, also a practical one. Nevertheless, the Army of the Cumberland comprised such a broad mix of backgrounds in its soldiery, and operated in an area that received, at best, mixed messages about what the war was about, as to render the perspectives of its veterans especially valuable for historians. "Cumberland narrators," Hunt notes, "provided ample testimony that the Civil War had been tricky and confusing as well as deadly" (35). Did Hunt's soldiers conclude that the war had been worth it as far as emancipation was concerned; did they believe that they had won a lasting victory that would bequeath an equally lasting legacy for the nation? On these questions, Hunt finds a degree of prevarication. Within the larger context of the war as one fought by citizen armies, and what that implied for the nation, he finds more. "In the end," he proposes, "Cumberland authors incorporated emancipation into their army's legacy by absorbing liberation into the nation's enduring mission" (97). Their war, consequently, "had been in so many ways a war of the American future" (101). Hunt's is such a marvelous and supremely well-crafted study; persuasive and provocative in equal measure. He succeeds in drawing out these men of the Army of the Cumberland not just from the battlefields they fought on, but from the historiographical battlefield that they now find themselves in. It is an excellent example of the many ways that America's Civil War past is inflected in its present, and the epitome of historical analysis...

Arrested histories: Tibet, the CIA and memories of a forgotten war

In the 1950s, thousands of ordinary Tibetans rose up to defend their country and religion against Chinese troops. Their citizen army fought through 1974 with covert support from the Tibetan exile government and the governments of India, Nepal, and the United States. Decades later, the story of this resistance is only beginning to be told and has not yet entered the annals of Tibetan national history. In Arrested Histories , the anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan shows how and why histories of this resistance army are “arrested” and explains the ensuing repercussions for the Tibetan refugee community. Drawing on rich ethnographic and historical research, McGranahan tells the story of the Tibetan resistance and the social processes through which this history is made and unmade, and lived and forgotten in the present. Fulfillment of veterans’ desire for recognition hinges on the Dalai Lama and “historical arrest,” a practice in which the telling of certain pasts is suspended until an undetermined time in the future. In this analysis, struggles over history emerge as a profound pain of belonging. Tibetan cultural politics, regional identities, and religious commitments cannot be disentangled from imperial histories, contemporary geopolitics, and romanticized representations of Tibet. Moving deftly from armed struggle to nonviolent hunger strikes, and from diplomatic offices to refugee camps, Arrested Histories provides powerful insights into the stakes of political engagement and the cultural contradictions of everyday life.

FRONTLINE—Psychodynamic Psychiatry: Present and Future

I have spent my career working at the border between psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The characteristics of this intellectual territory have changed dramatically in recent years. When I began my psychoanalytic training at Columbia in 1968, there was much communication between psychoanalysis and psychiatry, but the vector of communication was primarily from the former to the latter. Psychoanalysts had greater status than general psychiatrists. During WWII, psychoanalytic ideas had been of enormous assistance in treating what today would be termed PTSD among combat forces. In the large citizen armies and navies that fought in that war there were many individuals who had psychiatric disorders of various types. The so-called “organic psychiatrists” had relatively little to offer these troops but the analytically oriented psychiatrists did. They practiced what today would be called “psychodynamic psychiatry” and their results were impressive. They assessed their patients under all conditions, and used flexible and diverse treatments to help restore function. As a citizen soldier/psychiatrist in 1970-72 working in the States with evacuees from the war in Vietnam, I was grateful to read their reports. I learned a lot from them. Between WWI and the Vietnamese War the field became bureaucratized and driven by ideology. On the one hand, many important contributions were made during those years. On the other, however, the negative consequences of a rigidly hierarchical stance were serious and deleterious effects are still evident.

A Very Modern Rising

The Easter Rising began in central Dublin at midday on 23 April 1916 when about 150 uniformed men marched from the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union up the quay by the river Liffey, before turning right on to Sackville Street and then charging into the General Post Office, the GPO. Irritated customers at first refused to take the insurgents seriously but they soon took control of the building, tearing down partitions and erecting barricades to defend it from the expected counter-attack. At the same time other contingents of the Irish Volunteers (the nationalist paramilitary group formed in response to the Ulster Volunteers, the anti-Home Rule militia in the north-east) and the Irish Citizen Army (the workers militia formed to defend strikers during the great Dublin lock out of 1913) established themselves at various strategic locations around the city. By the time the holiday crowds, among them a sizeable contingent of British officers, began returning to Dublin from the traditional Easter Monday meeting at Fairyhouse racecourse in Co. Kildare, the most significant rebellion against British rule in Ireland for a century was underway. To most people, even to the majority of those who took part, the launch of the Rising was a complete surprise because it had been planned in secret by a handful of members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, better known in its Victorian heyday as the Fenians. Ernie O’ Malley, a young medical student and later a celebrated guerrilla commander in the War of Independence, described the rebellion as a ‘thunderclap’. After a day or two when spectators could gather to watch the unfolding pageant at the GPO, now flying the Irish tricolour rather than the Union Jack, the fighting intensified. By Wednesday of that Easter Week British forces had succeeded in surrounding the GPO and a gunboat sailed up the Liffey and began shelling Liberty Hall. Within a few more days the Rising was over: 450 people had been killed and a further 2,500 wounded.

The Essence of the “Market Army”

Western armies have undergone substantial organizational‐cultural transformations since the end of the Cold War. Two main themes have been suggested to describe these transformations: postmodernity and post‐Fordism. This article analyzes these profound shifts. The author portrays the new Western army as a “market army,” distancing itself from the “citizen army,” and envisions a continuum between these extreme types. The market army emulates market practices in order to adapt to modern strategic, economic, political, and cultural constraints. What typifies the market army is the subjection of military doctrine to the market, a post‐Fordist structure, a network‐centric hierarchy, market values borrowed by the military profession, the convergence of military and civilian occupations, the commodification of military service, and new contractual forms of bargaining between soldiers and the military. Israel serves as a critical case with which to develop the theory of the market army.

The legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: the nation-in-arms in French republican memory

A major contribution to the study of collective identity and memory in France, this book examines a French republican myth: the belief that the nation can be adequately defended only by its own citizens, in the manner of the French revolutionaries of 1793. Alan Forrest examines the image of the citizen army reflected in political speeches, school textbooks, art and literature across the nineteenth century. He reveals that the image appealed to notions of equality and social justice, and with time it expanded to incorporate Napoleon's victorious legions, the partisans who repelled the German invader in 1814 and the people of Paris who rose in arms to defend the Republic in 1870. More recently it has risked being marginalized by military technology and by the realities of colonial warfare, but its influence can still be seen in the propaganda of the Great War and of the French Resistance under Vichy.

Boer Propaganda During the South African War of 1899–1902

This article examines Boer propaganda on commando during the South African War by analysing how the two Boer governments and the military leadership endeavoured to inspire a citizen army and to keep the men in the field. In the South African War a commando was a Boer fighting unit, more or less the equivalent of a British regiment, and ‘on commando’ meant ‘in the field’. For the first seven months of the conflict, two important pro-Boer newspapers, De Volksstem and The Standard & Diggers' News were distributed on commando; carefully used, they exercised a significant impact on the combatants' morale. Later, in the guerrilla phase of the war, local newspapers, notably De Bazuin and De Zoutpansberg Wachter, often published under trying conditions, took their place. Furthermore, Boer officers played an important role by fanning patriotism in the ranks with their inspirational rhetoric. The Boer perception that his military and political cause was both just and noble before God was a useful propaganda tool, as were official war reports; they could, in addition to truths, include carefully selected half-truths and flagrant untruths.

"The Children of the Nation?": Representations of Poor Children in Mainstream Nationalist Journalism, 1882 and 1913

"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...

Politicking in The Blogosphere: Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics By Jerome Armstrong and Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga Chelsea Green, 2006, 216 pages. Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics By Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox Praeger Publishers, 2008, 230 Pages

Politicking in The Blogosphere: <b>Crashing the Gate</b>: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics By Jerome Armstrong and Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga Chelsea Green, 2006, 216 pages. <b>Netroots Rising</b>: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics By Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox Praeger Publishers, 2008, 230 Pages