Gladstone & The Irish Question

What was Gladstone’s level of success in dealing with the “Irish Question”? He looked at the whole complex of issues in a fresh way and that gave the Irish Catholics hope for the future. Evidence for The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland was an act of genius! So obvious, so simple, but no-one had [...]

Sligo Potato Famine 1845-6 (4)

A Poor Law had been introduced to Ireland in July 1838 which involved the division of the country into 130 “unions” consisting of a group of electoral divisions made up of a number of townlands. Sligo Union comprised 23 divisions and –as a principal town- had a workhouse. This was administered by the Board of [...]

4 Reasons why Britain conquered the World

Four vital factors in the Rise of Empire Britain developed through a combination of dynastic shifts, strategic trade outposts and aggressive nationalistic policies, expressed through its navy, into a position of world-wide authority (if not supremacy) between the years 1660 and 1760. It is tempting to consider the words of Horace Seeley, writing in 1870, [...]

Analysing “Empire”: the Boer Camps

The most significant threat to the British public’s acceptance of the Boer war came in its latter phase, with the 1901-02 scandal over the South African concentration camps established by the British army.

The Guardian and the Boer War

1900: A group of war correspondents in South Africa during the Boer War. Amongst them is a young Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965), middle row second from left, reporting for the Morning Post. The others include: back row, left to right: William Dinwiddie of Harper’s Weekly, Alister Campbell of Laffan’s News Agency, J Atkins of [...]

A “letter to the Times”: the YouTube of the Crimea

In their range and number, the letters to the editor during the Crimean War were truly extraordinary.

CRIMEA: Analyse the probable effect of “participatory journalism”

Here’s your essay title. 1. Read the article below on the Crimean War and the Freedom of the Press It includes the concept of “participatory journalism”. This phrase simply denotes the way that the Victorian public joined in the publication of information about the war and reaction to it, from their own perspectives, in private [...]

The Crimean war and the Freedom of the Press

The Crimean War produced the first generally acknowledged war correspondent:The Times’s William Howard Russell. But perhaps more importantly, the war also changed the way journalism itself functioned during wartime and the way readers participated in its reportage. Newspapers like The Times provided a public forum for the expression of private experiences of the war—a forum [...]

Fenton and Robertson: Crimean Photographers

This is Roger Fenton’s mobile dark room. His Crimean War photographs represent one of the earliest systematic attempts to document a war through the medium of photography. Fenton, who spent fewer than four months in the Crimea (March 8 to June 26, 1855), produced 360 photographs under extremely trying conditions. While these photographs present a [...]

What did the Crimean war mean for Europe?

Here we consider the effect of the Crimean War across Europe in its balance of power, and (in greater detai)l upon the foreign and domestic policies in Britain