Irish Famines before and after the Great Hunger ed. by Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Irish Famines before and after the Great Hunger ed. by Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran Michael de Nie (bio) Irish Famines before and after the Great Hunger, edited by Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran; pp. xxxviii + 352. Hamden, Connecticut: Quinnipiac University Press, 2020, $25.00. Reviewing collected volumes can be tricky. At their best, such books offer a series of strong, interconnected essays that speak to one another and collectively move forward their field of inquiry. Weaker examples of the genre can be uneven in quality and tone, with chapters that offer relatively few connections to each other or even to the central theme of the book. The volume under review, edited by two well-established scholars of the Great Famine, falls somewhere in the middle of these poles. On the whole, Irish Famines before and after the Great Hunger makes a valuable contribution to the field of Irish famine studies, broadening our understanding and appreciation of subsistence crises in Ireland beyond the now much-studied Great Hunger. The book makes its strongest and most original contributions in regard to three topics in particular: the experiences of famine migrants in Canada, the subsistence crisis of 1879 to 1882 (the “Forgotten Famine”), and the role played by the transatlantic press in famine relief and migration schemes. At the same time, it also contains some essays that feel underdeveloped or loosely tied to the theme. The essays are grouped into five more or less chronological sections, exploring famine and related topics before the Great Hunger, famine migration to Canada, food shortage and emigration from 1879 to 1882, hunger-related topics after 1900, and interpreting and teaching the famine today. Taken together, the essays in the first section usefully illuminate some important continuities in the history of Irish subsistence crises and the contemporary responses, exploring themes such as harvest failure and Ireland’s economic relationship to Britain, debates over relieving immediate distress versus responding to famine with long-term development projects, crime and social relations in the midst of famine, and Irish migrants’ role in creating hybrid cultures in their new homeland. These are solid themes, if somewhat unevenly presented. The following section on Canada and famine migration is rather stronger. For example, Laura J. Smith’s essay on transporting indigent Irish emigrants to Canada traces the dispersal of newly arrived migrants from the ports to Canada’s interior before and during the famine, offering important context for better understanding Irish settlement in the nineteenth century. Essays by Mark McGowan and Jason King both offer new perspectives on the infamous migration experiences of Major Denis Mahon’s tenants from Strokestown, demonstrating through careful research that long-held assumptions about their voyage and Mahon’s behavior are due for revision. King’s essay also illuminates how key elements of the popular memory of these people were formed at the time via the transatlantic press. The essays together offer an excellent case study of how transatlantic flows of migrants and information operated and influenced each other. The next six essays are concerned with the “Forgotten Famine” from 1879 to 1882, focusing in particular on two topics: the American response to Irish distress and James Hack Tuke’s emigration scheme. Harvey Strum’s chapter on the campaign to send an American warship with humanitarian aid to Ireland in 1880 is, like Smith’s, a model of the ideal essay to include in these types of collections—a well-researched, detailed, and cohesive short case study that both speaks to the overall theme of the book and points a way forward for further study. Catherine Shannon’s essay is similarly notable, [End Page 140] examining Land League fundraising campaigns in New England between 1879 and 1882, especially in the context of tours by Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Davitt, and others. As Shannon demonstrates, while the bulk of the funds raised in this period were devoted to the League’s relief fund for suffering tenants, the tours also raised substantial revenue for the League’s political activities, helping to cement the critically important dynamic of Irish-American financial support for nationalist politicians in Ireland. This flow of funds deeply influenced Irish politics and Anglo-Irish relations...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".