A lively and inviting history of Belfast—exploring the highs and lows of a resilient city Modern Belfast is a beautiful city with a vibrant tradition of radicalism, industry, architectural innovation, and cultural achievement. But the city’s many qualities are all too frequently overlooked, its image marred by association with the political violence of the Troubles. Feargal Cochrane tells the story of his home city, revealing a rich and complex history which is not solely defined by these conflicts. From its emergence as a maritime port to its heyday as a center for the linen industry and crucible of liberal radicalism in the late eighteenth century, through to the famous shipyards where the Titanic was built, Belfast has long been a hub of innovation. Cochrane’s book offers a new perspective on this fascinating story, demonstrating how religion, culture, and politics have shaped the way people think, act, and vote in the city—and how Belfast’s past continues to shape its present and future.

Marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Belfast's foundation, Belfast 400 offers a new history of one of the world's most fascinating—and misunderstood—cities. Drawing on a wide range of research by several scholars, S. J. Connolly shows how Belfast grew to become a place of contested identity and economics and why it would become one of the main theaters of Irish independence and the many violent events that would define it. Belfast and its history are full of contradictions. It was a significant part of Great Britain's rise to industrial greatness, but it is located not on the island of Great Britain, but in Ireland. While it was central to the establishment of a unique Irish identity, its politics and industrial character set it wholly apart from other Irish cities. An important part of the history of Ireland and the United Kingdom both, Belfast has never fit neatly into the accepted narrative of either. Belfast 400 gets beneath these complexities by raising crucial questions at every post along its history. Why, with its seemingly unfavorable position—a waterlogged river mouth—did it become one of the first human settlements in the area? How did it evolve from a minor outpost to a major city, and how did it expand into one of the world's largest centers of shipbuilding and textile manufacturing? What did this industrial development and the eventual decline of manufacturing mean for the people who lived there? Finally, how can Belfast—still managing fraught political relationships between its own citizens—redefine its identity and face the new challenges of the twenty-first century? By raising these and many other questions, Belfast 400 sheds new light on one of the most complex cities in northern Europe.

The untold story of a group of Irish cities and their remarkable development before the age of industrialization A backward corner of Europe in 1600, Ireland was transformed during the following centuries. This was most evident in the rise of its cities, notably Dublin and Cork. David Dickson explores ten urban centers and their patterns of physical, social, and cultural evolution, relating this to the legacies of a violent past, and he reflects on their subsequent partial eclipse. Beautifully illustrated, this account reveals how the country's cities were distinctive and--through the Irish diaspora--influential beyond Ireland's shores.

The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many facets of the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict, colloquially known as the Troubles, and its subsequent peace process. This volume is rooted in opening space to address controversial subjects, answer key questions, and move beyond reductive analysis that reproduces a simplistic two community theses. The temporal span of individual chapters can reach back to the formation of the state of Northern Ireland, with many starting in the late 1960s, to include a range of individuals, collectives, organisations, understandings, and events, at least up to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998. This volume has forefronted creative approaches in understanding conflict and allows for analysis and reflection on conflict and peace to continue through to the present day. With an extensive introduction, preface, and 45 individual chapters, this volume represents an ambitious, expansive, interdisciplinary engagement with the North of Ireland through society, conflict, and peace from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches. While allowing for rich historical explorations of high-level politics rooted in state documents and archives, this volume also allows for the intermingling of different sources that highlight the role of personal papers, memory, space, materials, and experience in understanding the complexities of both Northern Ireland as a people, place, and political entity.

Covering three centuries of unprecedented demographic and economic changes, this textbook is an authoritative and comprehensive view of the shaping of Irish society, at home and abroad, from the famine of 1740 to the present day. The first major work on the history of modern Ireland to adopt a social history perspective, it focuses on the experiences and agency of Irish men, women and children, Catholics and Protestants, and in the North, South and the diaspora. An international team of leading scholars survey key changes in population, the economy, occupations, property ownership, class and migration, and also consider the interaction of the individual and the state through welfare, education, crime and policing. Drawing on a wide range of disciplinary approaches and consistently setting Irish developments in a wider European and global context, this is an invaluable resource for courses on modern Irish history and Irish studies.

The Irish Presbyterian Mind considers how one protestant community responded to the challenges posed to traditional understandings of Christian faith between 1830 and 1930. Andrew R. Holmes examines the attitudes of the leaders of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to biblical criticism, modern historical method, evolutionary science, and liberal forms of protestant theology. He explores how they reacted to developments in other Christian traditions, including the so-called 'Romeward' trend in the established Churches of England and Ireland and the 'Romanisation' of Catholicism. Was their response distinctively Presbyterian and Irish? How was it shaped by Presbyterian values, intellectual first principles, international denominational networks, identity politics, the expansion of higher education, and relations with other Christian denominations? The story begins in the 1830s when evangelicalism came to dominate mainstream Presbyterianism, the largest protestant denomination in present-day Northern Ireland. It ends in the 1920s with the exoneration of J. E. Davey, a professor in the Presbyterian College, Belfast, who was tried for heresy on accusations of being a 'modernist'. Within this timeframe, Holmes describes the formation and maintenance of a religiously-conservative intellectual community. At the heart of the interpretation is the interplay between the Reformed theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith and a commitment to common evangelical principles and religious experience that drew protestants together from various denominations. The definition of conservative within the Presbyterian Church in Ireland moved between these two poles and could take on different forms depending on time, geography, social class, and whether the individual was a minister or a member of the laity.