“Scarce a Battlefield from the North Pole to the South”
This chapter examines how Irish people in the United States, Ireland, and abroad interpreted Irish participation in the American Civil War. It argues that, thanks in part to extensive worldwide press coverage of the conflict, the war solidified the Irish sense of themselves as an international commu...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | English |
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University of North Carolina Press
2015
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469620107.003.0005 |
| Summary: | This chapter examines how Irish people in the United States, Ireland, and abroad interpreted Irish participation in the American Civil War. It argues that, thanks in part to extensive worldwide press coverage of the conflict, the war solidified the Irish sense of themselves as an international community. There were two aspects to this wartime global nationalism. The first was an ethnic solidarity, which portrayed Irish Celts as a race of universal soldiers whose storied reputation for bravery and honor had been earned on countless battlefields across time and space. The second side of Irish global nationalism portrayed the war as part of a transnational ideological struggle. |
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