Search results for ""Author John Wilson Foster""

In three contributions to the little-researched subject of the history of science in Ireland, John Wilson Foster looks at neglected episodes in Irish cultural history from mid-Victorian to Edwardian times. He discusses Darwinism in late 19th-century Ireland and its impact on Irish churchmen, with special reference to Darwin's champion John Tyndall, whose famous declaration of materialism in his Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Belfast 1874 provoked a vehement response from the leaders of the Protestant as well as Catholic churches. Foster then moves to the Belfast of 1911 and the building and launching of the Titanic, which he sees as the culmination of the engineering genius of Belfast from the mid-19th to early 20th century. In his third essay, Foster looks at the growing interest in Belfast towards the end of the 19th century in amateur scientific fieldwork (for example, botany), encouraged by the values and preoccupations on Victorian culture. The book is based on lectures delivered at NUI Maynooth in the National University of Ireland's Visiting Lectureship series.

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''Ireland out of England'' plays with the ironies and follies of the campaign for a unified independent Ireland that has expressed little insight or care about what's involved.The title essay recounts the constant trouping of Southern Irish artists and professionals to Britain where they live, are welcomed and flourish. They are the talented crests of historic waves of Irish for whom England is the land of opportunity, as warmly familiar as the towns and fields of Leinster, Munster and Connaught. How do we square the Irish in Britain with the anti-Britishness of the politicians and pundits back home in Ireland, or with the clamour for the removal of Northern Ireland from the very UK in which so many Irish prosper?The book reveals other inconvenient truths about the push for a united Ireland that benign-sounding destination that to be reached seems to require a flight from reality and a refusal to let Northern Ir

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This is a story of a scarcely credible abundance, of flocks of birds so vast they made the sky invisible. It is also a story, almost as difficult to credit, of a collapse into extinction so startling to the inhabitants of the New World as to provoke a mystery. In the fate of the North American passenger pigeon we can read much of the story of wild America - the astonishment that accompanied its discovery, the allure of its natural 'productions', the ruthless exploitation of its 'commodities' and the ultimate betrayal of its peculiar genius. And in the bird's fate can be read, too, the essential vulnerability of species, the unpredictable passage of life itself.

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