Mention Bolivia or Belgium to the average American adult, and the conversation will soon flag. Bring up Ireland, and the talk will always find a focus. Yeats? Killarney? Guinness? Associa- tions generously tumble forth. Some 40 million Americans have Irish blood in their veins; five times that many, it seems, believe they can imitate an Irish brogue. Often overlooked-veiled, per-haps, an assumed familiarity-is how unfamiliar to most Americans the Republic of Ireland really is. The Republic is,...
Nature placed Ireland exactly the wrong distance from Great Britain.
Had the island been somewhat closer to its larger sister, the Irish people might well have become more fully assimilated into the British family, much as the Scots and Welsh have been. Had Ireland been placed farther out in the Atlantic, it might have been allowed to develop in relative peace, as Iceland was, with- out the incessant interference of a powerful neighbor.
As it happened, Ireland was just close enough to keep Lon-...
Army, Navy, and Air Force, together with their spouses, could sit comfortably inside Dublin's 50,000-seat Croke Park, where the national hurling and Gaelic football matches are played every autumn. There are more sheep in Ireland than peo- ple, and twice as many cows, and both enjoy the right of way on rural Irish roads. Life in Ireland is played on a very small stage-one reason, perhaps, why Irish newspapers feature no gossip columns, and why journalists have no tradition of inves- tigative reporting....
immigrants repre- sent the most miserable, backward class of peasantry in north- em Europe; they were also Roman Catholics in an obdurately Protestant land. Perhaps as many as one-third were not fluent in English. Virtually all of them were destitute.
Unlike many Germans and most Scandinavians, the new immigrants shunned the countryside. While the vast majority of them had been farmers, they had also been ignorant farmers. The oppressive Anglo-Irish landlord system back home, under which the Irish...
, is enhanced on nearly every page Louis Ie Brocquy's equally elegant abstract drawings.
Thanks to Christian missionaries, who arrived in Ireland during the fifth century A.D., the spoken verse of the Heroic Age was preserved for posterity on parchment. The mis- sionaries and later monks also penned poems, hymns, and tracts of their own. For these, see Douglas Hyde's Literary istory of Ireland (Scribner's, 1892; St. Martin's, 1980).
"From Clonmacnois I come; 1 My course of studies done I...
"Emily was my patron saint," said William Carlos Williams in a 1962 interview. More recently, another prominent American poet, Adrienne Rich, described Dickinson as "the genius of the 19th-century female mind in America." Rich went on to praise Dickinson for inventing "a language more varied, more com- pressed, more dense with implications, more complex of syntax, than any American poetic language to date."
Despite the accolades of the poets and the probing of biogra-...
history ." History, wrote Matthew Arnold, is a "huge Mississippi of falsehood." "Merely gossip," added Oscar Wilde. Such critics might have felt more hopeful had they seen the emergence of archaeology as a scholarly discipline. Known mostly for uncovering old tombs, old bones, and ancient cities, archaeologists occupy a peculiar place in academe: They are "social scientists," with strong links to anthropology and his- tory, but their techniques are often those...
The stuff of archaeology is the debris of yesterday.
Archaeology is the science of what has remained, for any rea- son at all, anyplace in the world, from any period of the past. The breadth of its concerns is virtually limitless, its raw material corre- spondingly wide-ranging: From stone tools, held in the strata at Olduvai Gorge, to a Roman villa in England, its buried foundation appearing as a pattern of "crop marks" in a wheat field; from butchered bones, found at the site of...
Archaeology as a scientific discipline has undergone a series of radical changes during the past 30 years in both its intellectual ori- entation and its methods-giving us the "new archaeology."
What is the new archaeology? It is not, really, a coherent in- tellectual movement, but at its heart lies the desire of archaeolo- gists to contribute to the general body of social-science theory regarding the nature of human behavior and the processes of cultural evolution. When and how did...
An-drew Sherratt of Oxford University. The 55 contributors to this compre- hensive, superbly illustrated volume cover everything from "the handaxe makers" to "early states in Africa" to "dating and dating methods." The en- cyclopedia represents, in Sherratt's words, "an attempt to summarize the present state of knowledge over the whole field of archaeological inquiry ."
Two especially useful adjuncts to the Cambridge encyclopedia are The Penguin Dictionary...