On 1 May 1169, three foreign ships cut through the gray surf off the coast of County Wexford and beached their keels on the gravel spit of Bannow Island. Out from the hulls stepped roughly thirty Norman knights encased in chainmail, accompanied by sixty mounted men-at-arms and three hundred archers and foot soldiers from the Welsh marches, led by Robert FitzStephen. For … [Read more...] about The Norman Invasion of Ireland

When we think of the 1916 Easter Rising,  we see it as a Dublin phenomenon: we speak of the heroism at the GPO, the sharp crack of rifles in St. Stephen’s Green, and the ultimate sacrifice of the signatories.  But there is a chapter of the 1916 Rising that played out far beyond the cobblestones of Dublin on the violent swells of the North Atlantic; a little-known story that … [Read more...] about The Ghost Ship of 1916: The Audacious Mission of the SS Aud

The morning of November 23, 1867, was cold and damp in Manchester. Three young Irishmen stood on a scaffold outside Salford Gaol before a crowd of ten thousand. William Philip Allen was nineteen, a carpenter. Michael Larkin, thirty-two, a tailor with a wife and five children waiting at home. Michael O'Brien, a shop assistant and U.S. citizen who had fought in America's Civil … [Read more...] about The Manchester Martyrs: “God Save Ireland”

Even today, our school children are told the story of the American Revolution as one of New England Puritan Yankees and "Scots-Irish riflemen" on the frontier fighting for freedom. Over time, this portrayal has hardened into a historical dogma. Even in an age of revisionism that rightly seeks to recover the voices of women, African Americans, and Native peoples, the Ulster … [Read more...] about The Patriots They Erased: Ireland’s Sons in Washington’s Army 

Jeremiah O'Brien was born in 1744 in Kittery, in the district of Massachusetts that would later form the state of Maine, the eldest of six sons of Morris and Mary O'Brien—Irish Catholic immigrants from County Cork. In 1765, the family moved to Machias, a frontier settlement on the Maine coast. There, the O'Briens established a sawmill operation along the Machias River. There, … [Read more...] about Before the U.S. Navy, There Was O’Brien