To say that Ireland and Britain have had a tumultuous history would be to greatly understate matters. The British invaded part of Ireland in the twelfth century, and over the next several centuries, gradually sought to exert domination over the whole island through military might and legislation. The 1800s were a pivotal period in the history of Britain’s attempts to dominate Ireland, as the Acts of Union introduced in 1800 brought Ireland completely under the political control of the British crown. Following the Acts of Union, the British made a concerted effort to suppress many aspects of Irish culture, in particular, the use of the Irish language. The fading of Irish culture was exacerbated by the Great Famine of the mid-1800s, which displaced or killed many Irish people and had an especially lethal impact on those parts of Ireland where speakers of the Irish language were concentrated. It is perhaps unsurprising that during this period when Irish identity was under threat from Britain, several Irish nationalist movements emerged. There were arguably two distinct, albeit heavily interrelated, types of Irish nationalism that developed: political nationalism, which campaigned for Ireland’s political independence from Britain, and cultural nationalism, which strove to assert Ireland’s distinct cultural identity. This exhibit will explore the Irish cultural nationalism that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The exhibit will be divided into four sections. The first will focus on the attempts of certain Irish individuals to preserve the Irish language. It will feature documents related to the Gaelic League, an organization founded in the early 1890s that played a critical role in the revival of the Irish language. The second section will explore how Irish authors turned to Irish folklore for inspiration in their attempts to assert a distinct Irish cultural identity in literature. This section will feature books by William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, two key figures of the Irish literary revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The third section will display objects associated with the Abbey Theatre, founded by Yeats, Lady Gregory, and their associates with the goal of developing a distinctly Irish style of drama. The final section of the exhibit will use two collections of Irish music to illustrate how Irish intellectuals worked to revive traditional Irish musical styles that had been fading due to Anglicisation. Overall, the exhibit will strive to paint a rounded picture of efforts during the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Irish to assert Ireland’s distinct cultural identity in the face of British attempts to Anglicise Ireland.