Happy St. Patrick's Day
St Patrick’s Day celebrations in nineteenth-century Trinidad were perhaps more formal than today’s festivities, but hangovers are timeless! According to letters written by Irishman John Black and his daughter Adele, Black took ‘a large dose of magnesia to clear his head’ on 18 March 1814, while his son-in-law John Shine was utterly ‘bewildered’ after the previous evening’s ‘many toasts’. The men had attended an annual dinner with ‘all the Irishmen’ of Port of Spain and according to Adele ‘their heads pay for it the next day.’ Like their counterparts elsewhere in the Irish diaspora, these Trinidadians developed their own traditions and continued to celebrate their Irish identity. A quick scan of the historiography of St. Patrick’s Day demonstrates how important the day is, across the religious divide, to Irish people outside Ireland. Click the links for some interesting reading about St Patrick’s Day in 19th-Century Sydney, England, Canada and Montserrat in the Caribbean.
Book update
I’ve received positive reports on my book proposal from two anonymous reviewers and an enthusiastic response from an academic press. My current task is to write a detailed response to the reviews. Both reviewers suggested some changes to my approach and my writing workshop group has helped me adjust chapter structure. After years immersed in research, it can be difficult to move out of the detail and see the bigger picture. Fingers crossed it won’t be long now until I can finalise publication details.
Reading and Listening
I’ve been making my way through Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. I’m keen for my book to engage deeply with slavery and its legacy, and to highlight individual enslaved people. Morgan’s book is an excellent example of how to do this. She draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the 16th-17th centuries, while maintaining an analytical focus on racial capitalism.
I highly recommend Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. The series tells the story of the more than 577 people enslaved by the Washingtons, through the stories of individual men and women. The podcast is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and adopts the same kind of approach as I (would like to) do by drawing on individual lives and stories to make a broader argument. The production is top-notch and it’s a very easy series to listen to, despite the at-times depressing material.