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Fighting For Their Lives: Why The Marginalized Irish From The 1840s-1910 Dominated American Prizefighting, Owen Marshall

Honors Program Theses and Projects

One of the most recognizable figures in the world during his lifetime, heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, previously Cassius Clay and Cassius X, put his self-esteem on display with the simple declaration “I am the greatest.” This was a phrase he told himself long before he truly was the greatest, but he proved it to the world in 1964 when he defeated defending champion Sonny Liston. Upon knocking out his dangerous, violent, and cheating opponent, Ali whipped himself into a frenzy, as onlookers saw him fall over the ropes, scream at the ringside reporters who had previously doubted him, and …

When Art Becomes Political: An Analysis Of Irish Republican Murals 1981 To 2011, Maura Wester

History & Classics Undergraduate Theses

For nearly thirty years in the late twentieth century, sectarian violence between Irish Catholics and Ulster Protestants plagued Northern Ireland. Referred to as “the Troubles,” the violence officially lasted from 1969, when British troops were deployed to the region, until 1998, when the peace agreement, the Good Friday Agreement, was signed. Despite the changes in the government system, two things have not changed in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement: the pride both Loyalists and Republicans have in their cultures and their means to express this: murals. Traditionally a Loyalist practice dating back to late 1920s, Republican murals did …

Contemptible Cravens And Dumb Beasts: The Story Of The Wiggans Patch Massacre, Kevin Cranney

History & Classics Undergraduate Theses

On the evening of December 9, 1875, around forty masked men broke into the boardinghouse of the elderly widow Margaret O’Donnell in Wiggans Patch, a mining town outside of Mahanoy City, and killed her pregnant daughter and her son, an alleged Molly Maguire. The perpetrators of the Wiggans Patch Massacre literally got away with murder. One of the most brutal crimes of a particularly violent era was soon forgotten, especially when the Molly Maguire trials began the following month. How did this happen? Why was the Wiggans Patch Massacre forgotten when within the next few years (1876-1879) twenty men were …

“Only A Passing Idiocy”: The Ku Klux Klan In Maine State Politics, Erin Best

Honors Program Theses and Projects

During the late the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French Canadians migrated to the United States to fill existing labor gaps in New England’s textile mills. By the 1920s, French Canadians and Franco-Americans dominated textile labor in Maine. Despite its general rural cultural landscape, the modernism of the 1920s did come to influence the lived-experience of Maine’s French-speaking population. Urban centers like Lewiston-Auburn, Portland, and Bangor were urban-industrial towns that tended to be oppositional to the state’s more rural and conservative demographic. This sparked a general counter-movement among Maine’s conservative Protestant population. Similar to other rural regions in the United …

The Shanachie, Volume 30, Number 4, Connecticut Irish-American Historical Society

The Shanachie (CTIAHS)

This 16-page issue of our newsletter commemorates the 100th anniversary of the armistice which ended World War I just 100 years ago.

Contents: Connecticut's Irish in World War I --Hartford Red Cross nurse served amid bombardments --Sgt. Stubby and Cpl. Conroy went off to war --With roots in Canada, Lafferty got into the fight early --Picketing White House in wartime: patriotic or treason? --Ansonia native among nation’s first female sailors --Medals and monument honor Fair Haven Irish lads --Daring young men in their flying machines --Knights of Columbus offered soup and solace for friend and foe alike --Sailor from Roscommon …

Feminist Oral History Practice In An Era Of Digital Self-Representation, Margo Shea

Margo Shea