Assassination and Alternative Facts in Postfamine Ireland
| with Sean Farrell, Associate Professor of History, Northern Illinois University
Thursday, October 5, 2017
12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Room 331, Social Sciences & Business Building
University of Missouri-St. Louis |
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| On September 15, 1854, a train carrying an estimated eight hundred men and women was derailed as it approached the train station outside of Trillick, a small village in northwestern Ireland. Two steam engines and a carriage careened down a forty-foot embankment onto the low-lying land below, killing two railway engineers and leaving several passengers injured. This was no accident; the train was driven off course by the deliberate placement of three large boulders on the recently-opened railway. Only the fact that the chain attaching the first and second carriages snapped upon impact prevented further tragedy. One of the world’s first “train wreckings”, the Trillick Railway Outrage received widespread attention across the British Isles as newspaper readers grappled with the event’s lethal mix of nineteenth-century progress and Ireland’s seemingly ancient religious quarrels.
This presentation focuses on the Trillick Railway Outrage and its aftermaths; focusing on the ways that various activists constructed and used narratives of the event to further their own agendas. Historians have described microhistory as an approach that asks “large questions in small spaces.” By looking closely at Trillick, we gain a greater appreciation for the way that sectarian division was made from the complex mosaics of Victorian Irish life. |
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Sean Farrell is Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University and a Past President of the American Conference for Irish Studies. His first book, Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Modern Ulster, 1784-1886, won the 2001 Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book in Irish Studies. He has co-edited two collections of essays, Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence and Culture in Modern Ireland (with Danine Farquharson) and Power and Popular Culture in Modern Ireland: Essays in Honor of James S. Donnelly, Jr. (with Michael de Nie) and published a number of articles and chapters on different aspects of nineteenth-century Irish history. He has just completed a book entitled Building the House of God: The Rev. Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast and is starting a new project on the Trillick Railway Outrage of 1854. |
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| Sponsored by the Smurfit-Stone Corporation Endowed Professorship in Irish Studies, International Studies and Programs, University of Missouri-St. Louis
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