With a film version of Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel Brooklyn, coming to American theaters later this year, Tom Deignan looks at the borough that was home to so many mid-century Irish immigrants.Back in January, a new generation of Brooklyn high school students were exposed to the beautiful prose of one of Irish America’s most gifted writers, Pete Hamill. “Bridge of Dreams,” an … [Read more...] about Forty Shades of Brooklyn
History Archives
Made in (18th Century) Ireland
The new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690 – 1840, is a legacy tribute to the last Knight of Glin. Popularly known as the “long 18th century,” beginning with the ascendancy of William and Mary over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1689 and culminating at the brink of Ireland’s Great Hunger in the … [Read more...] about Made in (18th Century) Ireland
The Things They Carried
What more fascinatingly intimate look into the lives of soldiers of WWI than a glimpse into the tokens they brought with them to battle from home? Housed at the Imperial War Museum in London, the First World War Galleries are an extensively curated look at one of the darkest times in human history. Paul Cornish’s book, named for the galleries, dives into the treasures and at … [Read more...] about The Things They Carried
Trinity Geologists Rewrite
Earth’s Evolutionary History
Geologists from Trinity College Dublin have rewritten evolutionary history by finding that oxygen-producing life forms were present on Earth some three billion years ago – 60 million years earlier than previously thought.
Working with colleagues from the Presidency University in Kolkata, India, the geologists found evidence for chemical weathering of rocks leading to soil … [Read more...] about Trinity Geologists Rewrite
Earth’s Evolutionary History
Whatever Happened
to Launt Thompson?
By Michael Burke, Contributor
How one of the most important post-Civil War sculptors died in obscurity and is buried in an unmarked grave.Lancelot (Launt) Thompson was born in the town of Abbeyleix, in what was then Queens County and is now County Laois, on February 8, 1833. He came to the United States in 1847 with his recently widowed mother, who had no means of support in Ireland. They settled in the … [Read more...] about Whatever Happened
to Launt Thompson?