seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Category Archives: Irish American


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Birth of Grace Kelly, Award Winning Actress & Princess of Monaco

Grace Patricia Kelly, an American Academy Award winning actress, is born into an affluent Catholic family of half Irish and half German descent in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 12, 1929. After starring in several significant films in the early to mid-1950s, she becomes Princess of Monaco by marrying Prince Rainier III in April 1956.

Kelly’s father, Irish American John B. Kelly, Sr., wins three Olympic gold medals for sculling, and owns a successful brickwork contracting company that is well known on the East Coast. As Democratic nominee in the 1935 election for Mayor of Philadelphia, he loses by the closest margin in the city’s history. In later years he serves on the Fairmount Park Commission and, during World War II, is appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as National Director of Physical Fitness. Her mother, Margaret Majer, has German parents. She teaches physical education at the University of Pennsylvania and is the first woman to coach women’s athletics at Penn. She also models for a time in her youth. After marrying John Kelly in 1924, she focuses on being a housewife until her four children are of school age, following which she begins actively participating in various civic organizations.

Kelly receives her elementary education in the parish of Saint Bridget’s in East Falls. While attending Ravenhill Academy, a reputable Catholic girls’ school, she models fashions at local charity events with her mother and sisters. In 1942, at the age of 12, she plays the lead in Don’t Feed the Animals, a play produced by the Old Academy Players also in East Falls. In May 1947, she graduates from Stevens School, a socially prominent private institution in nearby Chestnut Hill, where she participates in drama and dance programs. Owing to her low mathematics scores, she is rejected by Bennington College in July 1947. Despite her parents’ initial disapproval, she decides to pursue her dreams of becoming an actress.

After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1949, Kelly begins appearing in New York City theatrical productions and over 40 live drama productions broadcast in early 1950s Golden Age of Television. She gains stardom from her performance in John Ford‘s adventure-romance Mogambo (1953), for which she is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She wins the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the drama The Country Girl (1954). Other notable works include the western High Noon (1952), the romance-comedy High Society (1956), and three consecutive Alfred Hitchcock suspense thrillers: Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955). She works with some of the most prominent leading men of the era, including Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Ray Milland, James Stewart, Bing Crosby, William Holden, Cary Grant, Alec Guinness, and Frank Sinatra.

Kelly retires from acting at age 26 to marry Rainier and begins her duties as Princess of Monaco. Hitchcock hopes that she will appear in more of his films which require an “icy blonde” lead actress, but he is unable to coax her out of retirement. The Prince and Princess have three children: Princess Caroline, Prince Albert, and Princess Stéphanie. Princess Grace retains her link to America by her dual U.S. and Monégasque citizenship. Her charity work focuses on young children and the arts, establishing the Princess Grace Foundation-USA to support local artisans in 1964. Her organization for children’s rights, World Association of Children;s Friends (AMADE), gains consultive status within UNICEF and UNESCO. Her final film contribution is in 1977 to documentary The Children of Theatre Street directed by Robert Dornhelm, where she serves as the narrator. The documentary is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

On September 13, 1982, Princess Grace suffers a small stroke while driving back to Monaco from her country home in Roc Agel. As a result, she loses control of her 1971 Rover P6 3500 and drives off the steep, winding road and down the 120-foot mountainside. Her teenage daughter Stéphanie, who is in the passenger seat, tries but fails to regain control of the car. The Princess is taken to the Monaco Hospital (later named the Princess Grace Hospital Centre) with injuries to the brain and thorax and a fractured femur. She dies the following night at 10:55 PM after Rainier decides to turn off her life support. Stéphanie suffers a slight concussion and a hairline fracture of a cervical vertebra and is unable to attend her mother’s funeral.

Princess Grace’s funeral is held at the Cathedral of Our Lady Immaculate in Monaco-Ville, on September 18, 1982. After a Requiem Mass, she is buried in the Grimaldi family vault. Over 400 people attend, including Cary Grant, Nancy Reagan, Danielle Mitterrand, the Princess of Wales, and Empress Farah of Iran.

Rainier, who does not remarry, is buried alongside her after his death in 2005.


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Birth of David Whyte, Anglo-Irish Poet

David Whyte, Anglo-Irish poet, is born in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, England on November 2, 1955. He has said that all of his poetry and philosophy are based on “the conversational nature of reality.” His book The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America (1994) topped the best-seller charts in the United States.

Whyte’s mother is from Waterford, County Waterford, and his father is a Yorkshireman. He attributes his poetic interest to both the songs and the poetry of his mother’s Irish heritage and to the landscape of West Yorkshire. He grows up in West Yorkshire and comments that he had “a Wordsworthian childhood,” in the fields and woods and on the moors. He has a degree in marine zoology from Bangor University, a public university in Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales.

During his twenties, Whyte works as a naturalist and lives in the Galápagos Islands, where he experiences a near drowning on the southern shore of Hood Island. He leads anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, the Amazon and the Himalayas.

Whyte moves to the United States in 1981 and begins a career as a poet and speaker in 1986. From 1987, he begins taking his poetry and philosophy to larger audiences, including consulting and lecturing on organisational leadership models in the United States and UK exploring the role of creativity in business. He has worked with companies such as Boeing, AT&T, NASA, Toyota, the Royal Air Force and the Arthur Andersen accountancy group.

Work and vocation, and “Conversational Leadership” are the subjects of several of Whyte’s prose books, including Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as Pilgrimage of Identity, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship, and The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of The Soul in Corporate America which tops the business best seller lists, selling 155,000 copies.

Whyte has written ten volumes of poetry and four books of prose. Pilgrim, published in May 2012, is based on the human need to travel, “From here to there.” The House of Belonging looks at the same human need for home. He describes his collection Everything Is Waiting For You (2003) as arising from the grief at the loss of his mother. His latest book is Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, an attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ many everyday words we often use only in pejorative or unimaginative ways. He has also written for newspapers, including The Huffington Post and The Observer. He leads group poetry and walking journeys regularly in Ireland, England and Italy.

Whyte has an honorary degree from Neumann College, Pennsylvania, and from Royal Roads University, British Columbia, and is Associate Fellow of both Templeton College, Oxford, and the Saïd Business School, Oxford.

Whyte has spent a portion of every year for the last twenty-five years in County Clare. Over the years and over a number of volumes of poetry he has built a cycle of poems that evoke many of the ancient pilgrimage sites of The Burren mountains of North Clare and of Connemara.

Whyte runs the “Many Rivers” organisation and “Invitas: The Institute for Conversational Leadership,” which he founds in 2014. He has lived in Seattle and on Whidbey Island and currently lives in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. He holds U.S., British and Irish citizenship. He is married to Gayle Karen Young, former Chief Talent and Culture Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. He has a son, Brendan, from his first marriage to Autumn Preble and a daughter, Charlotte, from his second marriage to Leslie Cotter. He has practised Zen and was a regular rock climber. He is a close friend of the late Irish poet John O’Donohue.


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Birth of James Logan, 14th Mayor of Philadelphia

James Logan, a Scotch-Irish colonial American statesman, administrator, and scholar who serves as the fourteenth mayor of Philadelphia and holds a number of other public offices, is born in Lurgan, County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland, on October 20, 1674. He serves as colonial secretary to William Penn and is a founding trustee of the College of Philadelphia, the predecessor of the University of Pennsylvania.

Logan is born to Ulster Scots Quaker parents Patrick Logan (1640–1700) and Isabella, Lady Hume (1647–1722), who marry in early 1671 in Midlothian, Scotland. His father has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Edinburgh, and originally is an Anglican clergyman before converting to Quakerism, or the Society of Friends. Although apprenticed to a Dublin linen-draper, he receives a good classical and mathematical education, and acquires a knowledge of modern languages not common at the period. The Williamite War in Ireland (1688–1691) obliges him to follow his parents, first to Edinburgh, and then to London and Bristol, England where, in 1693, he replaces his father as schoolmaster. In 1699, he comes to the colony of Pennsylvania aboard the Canterbury as William Penn’s secretary.

Later, Logan supports proprietary rights in Pennsylvania and becomes a major landowner in the growing colony. After advancing through several political offices, including commissioner of property (1701), receiver general (1703), clerk (1701), and member (1703) of the provincial council, he is elected mayor of Philadelphia in 1722. During his tenure as mayor, he allows Irish Catholic immigrants to participate in the city’s first public Mass. He later serves as the colony’s chief justice from 1731 to 1739, and in the absence of a governor of Pennsylvania, becomes acting governor from 1736 to 1738.

As acting governor, Logan opposes Quaker pacifism and war tax resistance, and encourages pacifist Quakers to give up their seats in the Pennsylvania General Assembly so that it can make war requisitions. On October 9, 1736, he responds to requests from Native American leaders to control the sale of alcohol, which is creating serious social problems, by prohibiting the sale of rum in indigenous communities, but as the penalty 1s only a fine of ten pounds and the law is poorly enforced, it does not have a significant effect.

During his tenure as acting governor, Logan plays an active role in the territorial expansion of the colony. Whereas William Penn and his immediate successors had pursued a policy of friendly relations with the Leni Lenape (Delaware) peoples, Logan and other colony proprietors (notably the indebted brothers John, Richard and Thomas Penn) pursue a policy of land acquisition. Such efforts to expand are spurred by increased immigration to the colony and fears that the New York Colony is infringing on Pennsylvania’s northern borders in the Upper Delaware river valley. In addition, many proprietors (including Logan and the Penn brothers) had engaged in extensive land speculation, selling off lands occupied by the Lenape to new colonists before concluding an official treaty with the tribe.

As part of his efforts to expand Pennsylvania, Logan signs the Walking Treaty of 1737, commonly referred to as the Walker Purchase, with the Lenape, forcing the tribe to vacate lands in the Upper Delaware and Lehigh valleys under the auspices of the tribe having sold the lands to William Penn in 1686, a treaty whose ratifying document is considered by some sources to have been a fabrication. Under the terms of the treaty, the Lenape agree to cede as much territory as a man could walk in one and one-half days to the Pennsylvania colony. However, Logan uses the treaty’s vague wording, the Lenape’s unclear diplomatic status, and a heavily influenced “walk” to claim a much larger territory than is originally expected by the Lenape. In addition, he negotiates with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy to allow for the treaty to take place. As a result, the Iroquois (nominally the diplomatic overlords and protectors of the Lenape people) rebuff Lenape attempts to have the Iroquois intervene on their behalf. The net result of the Walker Treaty increases the colony’s borders by over 1,200,000 acres but leads to the diplomatic isolation of the Lenape people and a breakdown in relations between the Pennsylvania colony and the tribe.

Meanwhile, Logan engages in various mercantile pursuits, especially fur trading, with such success that he becomes one of the wealthiest men in the colonies. He writes numerous scholarly papers published by the American Philosophical Society and European journals. He is also a natural scientist whose primary contribution to the emerging field of botany is a treatise that describes experiments on the impregnation of plant seeds, especially corn. He tutors John Bartram, the American botanist, in Latin and introduces him to Carl Linnaeus.

Logan’s mother comes to live with him in Philadelphia in 1717. She dies on January 17, 1722, at Stenton, Logan’s country home. His daughter, Sarah, marries merchant and statesman Isaac Norris. Logan dies at the age of 77 on October 31, 1751, at Stenton, near Germantown, at the age of 77, and is buried at the site of Arch Street Friends Meeting House (built in 1804).

In Philadelphia, the Logan neighborhood and the landmark Logan Circle are named for him. His 1730 estate “Stenton” (now a National Historic Landmark, operated as a museum) is located in Logan area.


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Founding of the Celtic League, American Branch

The Celtic League, American Branch (CLAB) is founded in New York City on October 11, 1974.

The Celtic League is a pan-Celtic organisation, founded in 1961, that aims to promote modern Celtic identity and culture in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall and the Isle of Man – referred to as the Celtic nations. It places particular emphasis on promoting the Celtic languages of those nations. It also advocates further self-governance in the Celtic nations and ultimately for each nation to be an independent state in its own right. The Celtic League is an accredited non-governmental organization (NGO) with roster consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

The present Celtic League grows out of various other pan-Celtic organisations, particularly the Celtic Congress, but with a more political emphasis. Previously, Hugh MacDiarmid and others had suggested something along the same lines.

The Celtic League is started at the 1961 National Eisteddfod of Wales, which is held at Rhosllannerchrugog near Wrexham in northeast Wales. Two of the founding members are Gwynfor Evans and J. E. Jones, who are respectively president and secretary-general of the Welsh nationalist political party Plaid Cymru at the time. Interest is expressed by Scottish parties, and also by Breton nationalists.

There are six main, national branches of the Celtic League in the six Celtic countries, generally known by the Celtic language names of their countries: Ireland is known as Éire, Scotland as Alba, Wales as Cymru, Brittany as Breizh, Cornwall as Kernow and the Isle of Man as Mannin or Mann.

The Celtic League, American Branch (CLAB) is one of various diaspora branches, all of whom play little part in the annual general meetings. American author and linguist Alexei Kondratiev serves as president of the Celtic League, American branch. The CLAB prints its own quarterly newsletter, Six Nations, One Soul, which provides news of branch activities and events within the Celtic communities in the United States, publishes letters from members, and reviews books and recordings of Celtic interest. CLAB publishes at least six issues of a larger semi-annual magazine, Keltoi: A Pan-Celtic Review, from 2006 to 2008. CLAB also produces a wall calendar each year, with art from members, appropriate quotations, and anniversaries. Publication ceases with the 2008 issue.


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Birth of Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, American novelist, essayist, short story and screenwriter, is born into an Irish Catholic family on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he publishes four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he achieves temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, he receives critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

The son of middle-class Irish Catholics Edward and Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald is raised primarily in New York. He attends Princeton University but owing to a failed relationship with socialite Ginevra King and a preoccupation with writing, he drops out in 1917 to join the United States Army. While stationed in Alabama, he romances Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belongs to Montgomery‘s exclusive country-club set. Although she rejects Fitzgerald initially, because of his lack of financial prospects, she agrees to marry him after he publishes the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel becomes a cultural sensation and cements his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.

Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propels him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he writes numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s: The National Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, he frequents Europe, where he befriends modernist writers and artists of the “Lost Generation” expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), receives generally favorable reviews but is a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some labeling it the “Great American Novel.” Following the deterioration of his wife’s mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, he completes his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).

Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald turns to Hollywood, writing and revising screenplays. While living in Hollywood, he cohabits with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attains sobriety only to die of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44. His friend Edmund Wilson completes and publishes an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald’s death.

At the time of his death, the Roman Catholic Church denies the family’s request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic, be buried in the family plot in the Catholic St. Mary’s Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. He is buried instead with a simple Protestant service at Rockville Union Cemetery. When Zelda Fitzgerald dies in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in 1948, she is originally buried next to him at Rockville Union. In 1975, Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie successfully petitions to have the earlier decision revisited, and her parents’ remains are moved to the family plot in Saint Mary’s.


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The Battle of Chantilly

The predominately Irish 6th Louisiana Infantry Regiment fights at the Battle of Chantilly (or Ox Hill, the Confederate name), which takes place on September 1, 1862, in Fairfax County, Virginia, as the concluding battle of the northern Virginia campaign of the American Civil War. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson‘s corps of the Army of Northern Virginia attempts to cut off the line of retreat of the Union Army of Virginia following the Second Battle of Bull Run but is attacked by two Union divisions. During the ensuing battle, Union division commanders Isaac Stevens and Philip Kearny are both killed, but the Union attack halts Jackson’s advance.

On the morning of September 1, 1862, Union Maj. Gen. John Pope orders Maj. Gen. Edwin Vose Sumner of the II Corps, Army of the Potomac, to send a brigade north to reconnoiter. The army’s cavalry is too exhausted for the mission. But at the same time, he continues his movement in the direction of Washington, D.C., sending Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell‘s III Corps to Germantown (on the western border of modern-day Fairfax, Virginia), where it can protect the important intersection of Warrenton Pike and Little River Turnpike that the army needs for the retreat. He also sends two brigades from Maj. Gen. Jesse L. Reno‘s IX Corps, under the command of Brig. Gen. Isaac Stevens, to block Jackson. Maj. Gen. Philip Kearny’s division from the III Corps follows later that afternoon.

Jackson resumes his march to the south, but his troops are tired and hungry and make poor progress as the rain continues. They march only three miles and occupy Ox Hill, southeast of Chantilly Plantation, and halt, while Jackson himself takes a nap. All during the morning, Confederate cavalry skirmish with Union infantry and cavalry. At about 3:00 PM, Stevens’s division arrives at Ox Hill. Despite being outnumbered, Stevens chooses to attack across a grassy field against Brig. Gen. Alexander Lawton‘s division in the Confederate center. The Union attack is initially successful, routing the brigade of Colonel Henry Strong and driving in the flank of Captain William Brown, with Brown killed during the fighting. The Union division is driven back following a counterattack by Brig. Gen. Jubal Early‘s brigade. Stevens is killed during this attack at about 5:00 PM by a shot through his temple.

A severe thunderstorm erupts about this time, resulting in limited visibility and an increased dependence on the bayonet, as the rain soaks the ammunition of the infantry and makes it useless. Kearny arrives about this time with his division to find Stevens’s units disorganized. Perceiving a gap in the line he deploys Brig. Gen. David B. Birney‘s brigade on Stevens’s left, ordering it to attack across the field. Birney manages to maneuver close to the Confederate line but his attack stalls in hand-to-hand combat with Maj. Gen. A.P. Hill‘s division. Kearny mistakenly rides into the Confederate lines during the battle and is killed. As Kearny’s other two brigades arrive on the field, Birney uses the reinforcements as a rear guard as he withdraws the remainder of the Union force to the southern side of the farm fields, ending the battle.

That night, Maj. Gen. James Longstreet arrives to relieve Jackson’s troops and to renew the battle the following morning. The lines are so close that some soldiers accidentally stumble into the camps of the opposing army. The Union army withdraws to Germantown and Fairfax Court House that night, followed over the next few days by retreating to the defenses of Washington D.C. The Confederate cavalry attempts a pursuit but fails to cause significant damage to the Union army.

The fighting is tactically inconclusive. Although Jackson’s turning movement is foiled and he is unable to block the Union retreat or destroy Pope’s army, National Park Service historians count Chantilly as a strategic Confederate victory because it neutralizes any threat from Pope’s army and clears the way for Lee to begin his Maryland campaign. The Confederates claim a tactical victory as well because they hold the field after the battle. Two Union generals are killed, while one Confederate brigade commander is killed. Pope, recognizing the attack as an indication of continued danger to his army, continues his retreat to the fortifications around Washington, D.C. Lee begins the Maryland Campaign, which culminates in the Battle of Antietam, after Pope retreats from Virginia. The Army of the Potomac, under Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, absorbs the forces of Pope’s Army of Virginia, which is disbanded as a separate army.

The site of the battle, once rural farmland, is now surrounded by suburban development in Fairfax County. A 4.8-acre (19,000 m²) memorial park, the Ox Hill Battlefield Park, is located off of State Route 608 (West Ox Road) and lies adjacent to the Fairfax Towne Center shopping area and includes most of the Gen. Isaac Stevens portion of the battle, about 1.5% of the total ground. The park is under the jurisdiction of the Fairfax County Park Authority. In January 2005, the Authority approves a General Management Plan and Conceptual Development Plan that sets forth a detailed history and future management framework for the site.

A small yard located within the nearby Fairfax Towne Center has been preserved to mark the area crossed by Confederate troops to get to the Ox Hill battlefield.

(Pictured: Color lithograph “General Kearney’s gallant charge,” published by John Smith, 804 Market St., Philadelphia. From the Library of Congress.)


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Death of Irish Folk Musician Tommy Makem

Thomas “Tommy” Makem, internationally celebrated Irish folk musician, artist, poet and storyteller, dies in Dover, New Hampshire, on August 1, 2007, following a lengthy battle with lung cancer.

Makem is born in Keady, County Armagh, on November 4, 1932. He is best known as a member of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. He plays the long-necked 5-string banjo, tin whistle, low whistle, guitar, bodhrán and bagpipes, and sings in a distinctive baritone. He is sometimes known as “The Bard of Armagh,” taken from a traditional song of the same name, and “The Godfather of Irish Music.”

Makem’s mother, Sarah Makem, is an important source of traditional Irish music, who is visited and recorded by, among others, Diane Guggenheim Hamilton, Jean Ritchie, Peter Kennedy and Sean O’Boyle. His father, Peter Makem, is a fiddler who also plays the bass drum in a local pipe band named “Oliver Plunkett,” after a Roman Catholic martyr of the reign of Charles II of England. His brother and sister are folk musicians as well. Makem, from the age of eight, is member of the St. Patrick’s church choir for 15 years where he sings Gregorian chant and motets. He does not learn to read music but he makes it in his “own way.”

Makem starts to work at 14 as a clerk in a garage and later he works for a while as a barman at Mone’s Bar, a local pub, and as a local correspondent for The Armagh Observer.

Makem emigrates to the United States in 1955, carrying his few possessions and a set of bagpipes from his time in a pipe band. Arriving in Dover, New Hampshire, he works at Kidder Press, where his hand was accidentally crushed by a press in 1956. With his arm in a sling, he leaves Dover for New York City to pursue an acting career.

The Clancys and Makem are signed to Columbia Records in 1961. The same year, at the Newport Folk Festival, Makem and Joan Baez are named the most promising newcomers on the American folk scene. During the 1960s, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem perform sellout concerts at such venues as Carnegie Hall, and make television appearances on shows like The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. The group performs for President John F. Kennedy. They also play in smaller venues such as the Gate of Horn in Chicago. They appear jointly in the UK Albums Chart in April 1966, when Isn’t It Grand Boys reaches number 22.

Makem leaves the group in 1969 to pursue a solo career. In 1975, he and Liam Clancy are both booked to play a folk festival in Cleveland, Ohio, and are persuaded to do a set together. Thereafter they often perform as Makem and Clancy, recording several albums together. He once again goes solo in 1988. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he performs both solo and with Liam Clancy on The Irish Rovers‘ various television shows, which are filming in Canada and Ireland.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Makem is a principal in a well-known Irish music venue in New York, “Tommy Makem’s Irish Pavilion.” This East 57th Street club is a prominent and well-loved performance spot for a wide range of musicians. Among the performers and visitors are Paddy Reilly, Joe Burke, and Ronnie Gilbert. Makem is a regular performer, often solo and often as part of Makem and Clancy, particularly in the late fall and holiday season. The club is also used for warm-up performances in the weeks before the 1984 reunion concert of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In addition, the after-party for Bob Dylan‘s legendary 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration at Madison Square Garden in 1992 is held at the Irish Pavilion.

In 1997 Makem writes a book, Tommy Makem’s Secret Ireland, and in 1999 premiers a one-man theatre show, Invasions and Legacies, in New York. His career includes various other acting, video, composition, and writing credits. He also establishes the Tommy Makem International Festival of Song in South Armagh in 2000.

Tommy Makem dies in Dover, New Hampshire, on August 1, 2007, following a lengthy battle with lung cancer. He continues to record and perform until very close to the end. Paying tribute to him after his death, Liam Clancy says, “He was my brother in every way.” He is buried next to his wife at New Saint Mary Cemetery in Dover.


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Death of James A. Mulligan, Union Army Colonel

James Adelbert Mulligan, a colonel of the 23rd Illinois Infantry Regiment in the Union Army during the American Civil War, dies on July 26, 1864, of wounds sustains at the Second Battle of Kernstown three days earlier.

Mulligan is born on June 30, 1830, in Utica, New York. His parents had immigrated from Ireland and his father died when he was a child. His mother remarries a Michael Lantry of Chicago, Illinois, and moves there with her son, who later attends the St. Mary’s on the Lake College of North Chicago. From 1852–54 he reads law in the offices of Isaac N. Arnold, U.S. Representative from the city. He is admitted to the bar in 1856 and commissioned a second lieutenant in the “Chicago Shield Guards.”

At the onset of the American Civil War, Mulligan raises the 23rd Illinois Infantry Regiment in 1861, which is locally known as the “Irish Brigade” (not to be confused with a New York unit by the same name). This unit includes the Chicago Shield Guards. In September 1861, he leads his troops toward Lexington, Missouri, as word had been received that this vital river town will be attacked by the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard under Major General Sterling Price.

The First Battle of Lexington, often referred to as the Battle of the Hemp Bales, commences on September 13, 1861, when 12,500 soldiers of the Missouri State Guard begin a siege of Mulligan’s diminutive command, entrenched around the town’s old Masonic College. On September 18, Price’s army mounts an all-out assault on Mulligan’s works, which fails. Cannon fire continues through September 19. On the 20th, units of Price’s army use hemp bales soaked in the Missouri River as a moving breastwork to work their way up the river bluffs toward Mulligan’s headquarters. By 2:00 PM, Mulligan has surrendered. Combined casualties are 64 dead, and 192 wounded. Price is reportedly so impressed by Mulligan’s demeanor and conduct during and after the battle that he offers him his own horse and buggy and orders him safely escorted to Union lines.

Mulligan is commander of Camp Douglas, a prisoner of war camp in Chicago, from February 25, 1862, to June 14, 1862. The camp had been constructed as a short-term training camp for Union soldiers but is converted to a prisoner of war camp for captured Confederate soldiers after the fall of Fort Donelson.

Mulligan and his regiment are assigned to the Railroad Division of the Middle Department between December 17, 1862, and March 27, 1863. Then they are assigned to 5th Brigade, 1st Division, VIII Corps in the Middle Department between March 27, 1863, and June 26, 1863.

Between August and December 1863, Mulligan oversees the construction of Fort Mulligan, an earthworks fortification located in Grant County, West Virginia. This fort remains one of the best-preserved Civil War fortifications in West Virginia and has become a local tourist attraction.

On July 3, 1864, only three weeks before his death, Mulligan distinguishes himself in the Battle of Leetown, fought in and around Leetown, Virginia. Federal troops are retreating in the face of Major General Jubal Early‘s relentless Confederate advance down the Shenandoah Valley during the Second Valley Campaign. Hoping to buy time to concentrate Union forces and supplies, Major General Franz Sigel orders him to hold Leetown for as long as possible and then conduct a fighting retreat as slowly as possible to cover the other withdrawing Union units. He manages to hold Leetown for the entire day before being compelled to retreat, albeit very slowly. He continues to battle Early’s troops all the way from Leetown to Martinsburg, West Virginia, buying valuable time for Union commanders to concentrate their forces in the Valley.

On July 24, 1864, Mulligan leads his troops into the Second Battle of Kernstown, near Winchester, Virginia. Late in the afternoon, Major General John B. Gordon’s Confederate force attacks Mulligan’s 1,800 soldiers from ground beyond Opequon Church. Mulligan briefly holds off Gordon’s units, but Confederate Major General John C. Breckinridge leads a devastating flank attack against the Irishmen from the east side of the Valley Pike. Sharpshooters then attack his right flank from the west. Now encompassed on three sides, the Union battle line falls apart.

With Confederates closing from all around, Mulligan orders his troops to withdraw. As he stands up in his saddle to spur his men on, Confederate sharpshooters concealed in a nearby stream bed manage to hit the Union commander. His soldiers endeavor to carry him to safety, but the unyielding Confederate fire make this an impossible task. He is well aware of his situation, and the danger his men are in, and so he famously orders, “Lay me down and save the flag.” His men reluctantly comply. Confederate soldiers capture him and carry the mortally wounded colonel into a nearby home, where he dies two days later on July 26, 1864. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery, Evanston, Illinois.

On February 20, 1865, the United States Senate confirms the posthumous appointment of Mulligan to the rank of brevet brigadier general of U.S. Volunteers to rank from July 23, 1864, the day before he is mortally wounded at the Second Battle of Kernstown.


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Death of Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States

Ulysses S. Grant, American military leader who serves as the 18th president of the United States (1869 to 1877), dies on July 23, 1883, after a long and painful battle with throat cancer.

Grant is born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio, on April 27, 1822, to Jesse Root Grant, a tanner and merchant, and Hannah Simpson Grant. His mother descends from Presbyterian immigrants from Ballygawley, County Tyrone.

Raised in Ohio, Grant possesses an exceptional ability with horses, which serves him well through his military career. He is admitted to West Point, graduates 21st in the class of 1843 and serves with distinction in the Mexican–American War. In 1848, he marries Julia Dent, and together they have four children. He abruptly resigns his army commission in 1854 and returns to his family but lives in poverty for seven years.

Grant joins the Union Army after the American Civil War breaks out in 1861 and rises to prominence after winning several early Union victories on the Western Theater. In 1863 he leads the Vicksburg campaign, which gains control of the Mississippi River. President Abraham Lincoln promotes him to lieutenant general after his victory at Chattanooga. For thirteen months, he fights Robert E. Lee during the high-casualty Overland Campaign and at Petersburg. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox. A week later, Lincoln is assassinated and is succeeded by Andrew Johnson, who promotes him to General of the Army in 1866. Later he openly breaks with Johnson over Reconstruction policies as he used the Reconstruction Acts, which had been passed over Johnson’s veto, to enforce civil rights for recently freed African Americans.

A war hero, drawn in by his sense of duty, Grant is unanimously nominated by the Republican Party and is elected president in 1868. As president, Grant stabilizes the post-war national economy, supports ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, and crushes the Ku Klux Klan. He appoints African Americans and Jewish Americans to prominent federal offices. In 1871, to help reduce federal patronage, he creates the first Civil Service Commission. The Liberal Republicans and Democrats unite behind his opponent in the 1872 presidential election, but he is handily re-elected. His Native American policy is to assimilate Indians into the White culture. The Great Sioux War of 1876 is fought during his term. In his foreign policy, the Alabama claims against Great Britain are peacefully resolved, but his prized Caribbean Dominican Republic annexation is rejected by the United States Senate.

Grant’s responses to corruption charges, in his federal departments rife with scandal, are mixed, often naïvely defending the culprits, particularly his war-time comrade Orville E. Babcock. But he also appoints cabinet reformers, such as John Brooks Henderson, for the prosecution of the Whiskey Ring. The Panic of 1873 plunges the nation into a severe economic depression that allows the Democrats to win the House majority. In the intensely disputed 1876 presidential election, he facilitates the approval by Congress of a peaceful compromise.

In his retirement, Grant is the first president to circumnavigate the world on his tour, meeting with Queen Victoria and many prominent foreign leaders. In 1880, he is unsuccessful in obtaining the Republican presidential nomination for a third term. In the final year of his life, facing severe financial reversals and dying of throat cancer, he writes his memoirs, which prove to be a major critical and financial success.

After a year-long struggle with throat cancer, surrounded by his family, Grant dies at 8:08 AM at his Mount McGregor cottage on July 23, 1885, at the age of 63. Philip Sheridan, then Commanding General of the Army, orders a day-long tribute to Grant on all military posts, and President Grover Cleveland orders a thirty-day nationwide period of mourning. After private services, the honor guard places Grant’s body on a special funeral train, which travels to West Point and New York City. A quarter of a million people view it in the two days before the funeral. Tens of thousands of men, many of them veterans from the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), march with Grant’s casket drawn by two dozen black stallions to Riverside Park in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. His pallbearers include Union generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan, Confederate generals Simon Bolivar Buckner and Joseph E. Johnston, Admiral David Dixon Porter, and Senator John A. Logan, the head of the GAR. Following the casket in the seven-mile-long procession are President Cleveland, the two living former presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur, all of the President’s Cabinet, as well as the justices of the Supreme Court.

Attendance at the New York funeral tops 1.5 million. Ceremonies are held in other major cities around the country, while Grant is eulogized in the press and likened to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. His body is laid to rest in a temporary tomb in Riverside Park. Twelve years later, on April 17, 1897, he is reinterred in the General Grant National Memorial, also known as “Grant’s Tomb,” the largest mausoleum in North America.


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Birth of Sean Scully, Painter, Printmaker, Sculptor & Photographer

Sean Scully, Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer, is born in Dublin on June 30, 1945. His work is held in museum collections worldwide and he has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee.

Four years after his birth, Scully’s family moves to London where they live in a working-class part of South London, moving from lodging to lodging for a number of years. By the age of 9, he knows he wants to become an artist. From the age of 15 until he is 17, he is apprenticed at a commercial printing shop in London as a typesetter, an experience that greatly influences his future artwork.

Scully studies at Croydon School of Art between 1965-67 and at Newcastle University between 1967-71. He is awarded the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship in 1972 to attend Harvard University. It is during this first stay in the United States that he begins to experiment with new techniques such as tape and spray paint. In 1975 he is awarded a Harkness Fellowship and establishes a studio in New York, where he settles, becoming an American citizen in 1983.

Over the years, Scully develops and refines his own recognisable style of geometric abstraction and most notably his characteristic motif of the ‘stripe.’ Although he is predominately known for his monumental paintings, he is also a gifted printmaker who has made a notable body of woodcuts and etchings.

Scully has his first solo exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, London in 1973. He has his first retrospective at the Ikon Gallery in Brindleyplace, Birmingham, in 1981, which travels throughout the United Kingdom. In 1989 his first solo exhibition in a European museum travels from the Whitechapel Gallery in London to Palacio Velázquez in Madrid and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich. He has further solo exhibitions at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen in Düsseldorf (2001) which travels to Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern in Valencia; The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (2005) travels to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio and finally the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A major retrospective tours multiple venues in China between 2015 and 2017.

Scully’s paintings and prints are held in the collections of Tate in London, the Albertina in Vienna, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Instituto Valencia d’Arte Modern in Valencia, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, Guangzhou Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China.

Scully has held teaching positions at Chelsea College of Arts and Goldsmith’s College of Art and Design, both in London, Princeton University in New Jersey, Parsons School of Design in New York, and most recently at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. He is shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989 and in 1993, and is elected a Royal Academician in 2013. He participates for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2014.

Sean Scully lives and works in New York and in Bavaria, Germany.