Description
Book SynopsisA work about Belfast in the middle of the nineteenth century. It looks at how and why Ireland's most prosperous and industrialized town began to tear itself apart. It tells that through a series of steadily escalating riots, working-class Protestants and Catholics forged a tradition of violence that profoundly shaped their own identities.
Trade Review'This is a significant and original study that should have a profound influence on how historians understand the evolution and meanings of violence in Ulster. The book is engagingly written, deftly integrates a broad range of historical and cultural sources and provides a new historical, and no doubt controversial, narrative and analysis that is bound to engage the attentions of historians, cultural analysts and students for quite some time to come.' Professor Maria Luddy, University of Warwick
Table of ContentsList of maps and illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction.
1. Defending the faith: evangelicalism and anti-Catholicism
2. Belfast Catholics: 'a mere incohesive heap'
3. An unenviable notoriety: the 1857 riots
4. Local government and Catholic alienation
5. The idea of order: Dublin Castle and Belfast Protestants
6. The city erupts: August 1864
7. Glasgow: sectarian détente
8. Memories of violence, 1864-1886
Epilogue
Appendix: 1864 riot ballads
Bibliography
Index
