History Studies: University of Limerick History Society Vol (17)

As on previous occasions, it gives me great pleasure to write the Foreword to this volume of History Studies, now in its seventeenth year. History Studies is a unique achievement of UL’s Student History Society; it also reflects the talent of the island of Ireland’s (and beyond) talent among its emerging scholars. Each volume goes through a rigorous peer review and the result is a showcase of the very best of history writing in our universities today. This year sees a return to diversity in the range of topics (last year was themed to coincide with the 1916 Rising). The eight contributions by undergraduates and graduates take us from eighteenth-century Ireland to late twentieth-century Peru, with stops in Belfast, the American Deep South, the former West Germany, and twentieth-century Ireland. There is something in the present volume for every interested reader. The volume opens with a wonderful essay by Lesley Donaldson from Queen’s University Belfast (and the only female among the contributors to this volume) on the attempt to initiate a slum clearance of the oldest central streets of Belfast in the mid-nineteenth century.