The spirits of the dead return in many shapes and in many locations in Ireland. There are the wraith-like ghosts and the full-bodied type, the dangerous and damaging, the threatening and the merely frightening. There are notorious buildings where down through the centuries spectres have been seen or heard, some, such as Leap Castle, where psychics have been overwhelmed by the intensity of the atmosphere. There are families pursued by spirits who warn them of impending death or seem to be t...

Witch trials in the European or American sense were not common in Ireland although they did occur. In this book the stories of four remarkable court cases that took place from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century are told; other chapters chronicle the extraordinary lives of individuals deemed to be practitioners of the black arts – hedge witches, sorcerers and sinister characters.The book gives a unique insight into the fascinating overlap between witch belief and the vast rang...

Through letters and other writings, this historical study chronicles an Irish Catholic family's influence on mid-nineteenth–century South Carolina.For Church and Confederacy unveils the lives of the Lynch family during the late antebellum and Civil War years. Settling in the South Carolina upcountry, Irish immigrants Conlaw and Eleanor Lynch imparted their ambitions to their children, several of whom would make exceptional marks in such areas as education, ...

In this follow-up volume to For Church and Confederacy: The Lynches of South Carolina, Robert Emmett Curran extends his corpus of work on the history of Catholicism in the South through the eyes of the Lynch family of South Carolina. An Irish American family who sympathized with the Confederacy, the Lynches rose to prominence economically and in religious leadership during the late 1800s. Curran’s latest volume features a collection of personal correspondence from Lynch family mem...

How a key period in American Catholic history connects with contemporary populismCatholics fought on both sides of the American Civil War, but few supported the war's evolving aim of emancipating the enslaved. After the war, white Catholics played decisive roles in creating and promoting the ideology of the Lost Cause, a romantic distortion that the war had been a noble Southern fight for freedom, not caused by secession to preserve slavery.Catholics, t...

Among the finer soldier-diarists of the Civil War, John Edward Dooley first came to the attention of readers when an edition of his wartime journal, edited by Joseph Durkin, was published in 1945. That book, John Dooley, Confederate Soldier, became a widely used resource for historians, who frequently tapped Dooley’s vivid accounts of Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, where he was wounded during Pickett’s Charge and subsequently captured.As it happens, the 1945 ed...

Robert Emmett Curran’s masterful treatment of American Catholicism in the Civil War era is the first comprehensive history of Roman Catholics in the North and South before, during, and after the war. Curran provides an in-depth look at how the momentous developments of these decades affected the entire Catholic community, including Black and indigenous Americans. He also explores the ways that Catholics contributed to the reshaping of a nation that was testing the fundamental proposition o...

By Anna Katharine GreenNarrated by Robert CurranA plan for a daring robbery is hatched between a professional criminal and an unscrupulous office manager. One person in particular has to be drawn into this nefarious scheme -the business owner's personal assistant, the young and attractive Grace Lee. Will she have the pluck and resourcefulness to deal effectively with this perilous situation?

Observations on the new American republic by an early president of Georgetown UniversityFather Giovanni Antonio Grassi was the ninth president of Georgetown University and pioneered its transition into a modern institution, earning him the moniker Georgetown’s Second Founder. Originally published in Italian in 1818 and translated here into English for the first time, his News on the Present Condition of the Republic of the United States of North America re...

Sin and Sorrow are Common to AllA Drama in Four ActsBy Alexander OstrovskyTranslated by George Rapall NoyesA central theme of Ostrovsky's plays is the inevitablestruggle between the demands of personal moralityand and those dictated by social propriety.In this grim drama the dramatist sketches a tragic incidentarising from the conflict of two social classes, the pettytradesmen and the nobility. From the coarse environment...

Your teenager just told you to retake your driving test. Not about your actual driving—about how you navigate your relationship with them. They can now choose not to engage, not to share what's happening in their life, to simply withdraw. This is the ultimate test of parenting. We're in crisis. Teenage mental health is at epidemic levels. Technology hasn't created this crisis— it's exposed what was already broken. After 25 years living in families' homes, Jenny Roberts reveals the truth: n...

While small scale enterprise has expanded rapidly in recent years the way ahead looks uncertain. Drawing together recent research and thinking on small business activities from several disciplines, this book gives a comprehensive picture of the current situation and assesses the future. It evaluates the impact of such diverse influences as technological innovation, demogrpahic change, changes in orgh environment, women and entreprenuership, and by analysing trends in employment levels, ban...