Abstract
The unfolding of history influences how we view the past. Changing events and circumstances affect the type of questions we ask about history, the chronologies we impose and the answers we reach: ‘even the recorded past changes in the light of subsequent history’.1 Tony Judt has recently remarked how the events of the winter of 1989 — the fall of the Berlin Wall and popular uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania — not only opened up possibilities for Europe’s future, but also created a new perspective on its past: ‘the years 1945–89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age’.2
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Notes
Eric Hobsbawm, On History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p. 235; original emphasis.
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Heinemann, 2005), p. 2.
David McKettrick Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women, and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2004).
Adrian Guelke, ‘Commentary: truth, reconciliation, and political accommodation’, Irish Political Studies, 22 (3) (2006): 363–6.
Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution: 1529–1642 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 146.
Eamon Phoenix, Northern Nationalism: Nationalist Politics, Partition, and the Catholic Minority in Northern Ireland, 1890–1940 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Society, 1994), p. 399.
Thomas Hennessey, Northern Ireland: The Origins of the Troubles (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005), p. xi.
Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt, and the Origins of the Troubles (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), p. 8.
Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, Northern Ireland, 1921–2001: Political Forces and Social Classes (London: Serif, 2002), pp. 131–50.
Bob Purdie, Politics in the Streets: The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1990), pp. 157–8.
Thomas Hennessy, A History of Northern Ireland, 1920–1996 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1997), p. 121.
Henry Patterson and Eric Kaufmann, Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945: The Decline of the Loyal Family (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 72.
Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Marc Mulholland, Northern Ireland at the Crossroads: Ulster Unionism in the O’Neill Years, 1960–9 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Prince, Northern Ireland’s’68.
Bew et al., Northern Ireland; Kenneth Bloomfield, The Tragedy of Errors: The Government and Misgovernment of Northern Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
Hennessey, Northern Ireland; Niall Ó Dochartaigh, From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the Birth of the Irish Troubles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
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© 2010 Cillian McGrattan
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McGrattan, C. (2010). Introduction. In: Northern Ireland 1968–2008. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277045_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277045_1
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