American people of Irish descent

introduce students to satire and argumentative essays, but what made A Modest Proposal so influential? Swift masterfully combined satire with the ability to actually make a point, showing the struggles of the Irish and the apathy of the English. Swift proposes a “modest” solution to starvation and Irish…

of the judgments made about Ireland and the Irish in Victorian England, and that theme had a distinctly ethnic and racial character. Stated simply, this consensus amounted to an assumption or a conviction that the 'native Irish ' were alien in race and inferior in culture to the Anglo-Saxons" (Curtis 5). In North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, this Victorian undercurrent of anti-Irish sentiment is felt throughout the novel. The novel 's view of the Irish spans from sympathy and pity to…

lead to right action" ('The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver', 1955). Swift uses satire to ridicule what he sees as humankind's flaws to the point that his readers, as humans, have no choice but the change their outlook and their actions. From the tiny people of Lilliput, who refuse to admit their shortcomings, to the giants of Brobdingnag, who show how disgusting humanity can appear when observed too closely, to the Yahoos and Houyhnhnm that force readers to disassociate from humankind; Swift finds…

Following North, Heaney’s next collection of poetry was Field Work which largely documents his four years spent in Glanmore County Wicklow. The significance of this move is that it took him South of the border with the Republic of Ireland, a haven away from the sectarian violence of the North. Inevitably, this could be assumed as Heaney’s deliberate removal from the political situation, however, Joshua Weiner wrote: While the move south seemed to some a deliberate withdrawal from a previous…

State was born so that the number of native speakers would grow and the language would come alive again. Still, the project of a return to Irish proved to be impossible to put into practice and by 1960s, less and less people knew it or used it in everyday conversation. The native speakers of Irish were less than 70,000 out of a population of 2,884,002 people in 1966 [Brown & Tobin (152) & census page, see website at the bottom of the page]. Further, an investigation, which was conducted from…

Patrick’s “Britanniis” which is the name given for his homeland in the oldest surviving copy of Patrick’s Confessio, preserved in the Book of Armagh, is a reference to the region we now call Brittany and not to the island of Britain, exclusively. (Irish Times, 2013) Just by looking at the different opinions of these two historians shows how a lack of evidence leads to different interpretations of the wording/meaning of the Confessio. The lack of clarification available is a disadvantage of using…

The term satire comes from the root word Sartre. The target of satire has been to reform a society by exposing the vices and follies of it. Satire deals with that which a man tries to hide. It is like a glass or a mirror that reflects its ultimate target that is self-deception and brings the hypocrisy and deception of a society to the foreground. The satirist himself condemns the social evils and ills. There is a beauty that can come out of the representation of the evil. This beauty, which is…

During the 1800’s, the potato famine in Ireland caused around one million Irish people to immigrate to America. They settled in cities and worked in factories, and generally, were pretty poor. With the Irish immigration came a lot of Anti-Irish Sentiment from the Americans. That leads us back to the question- were Irish considered white in the 19th century America? Well, that depends on what your definition of “white” is. Obviously, it is a color...or rather, lack of color. It can also be used…

Europeans immediately began the journey of colonizing the area. Emerging from these newly established colonies were New England and the Chesapeake. These two areas were built along the Atlantic Coast, housing hundreds of European settlers. However, as the people of New England and the Chesapeake began to construct societies of their own, the differences between the two colonies escalated. The differences between the European societies were due to the contrasting reasons for settlement in the…

Irish author, Charles Handy, once said, “Change is only another word for growth, another synonym for learning” (“Charles” 2017. Par 7). Handy attempted to convey that growth is prompted by change. This assertion is a lesson that I learned first hand when I moved from Tennessee to Michigan at the age of ten. The move pushed me into adolescence, and I transformed into an entirely different person that year. Later down the road when I saw myself headed down the wrong path because of my lack of…