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Dublin Obstetrician Meets ‘Ideal Man’ in the Arctic, 1812
In 1812, Thomas McKeevor, a young Dublin obstetrician, crossed the Atlantic as physician to around 70 Irish and Hebridean migrants to the Red River Colony or “Selkirk Settlement” in Canada. In 1819, he published a short, 76-page account of the journey, describing Canadian natural history and the Inuit and First Nations. The book bore a long, descriptive title typical…
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John Lee’s Walking Tour of England and Wales, August 1806
See John Lee’s biography here. On 31 July 1806, 21-year-old John Fiott (later known as John Lee) set out on a seven-month walking tour of England, Wales, and Ireland. He walked almost every day and kept a detailed diary of the things he saw and the people he met. Those diaries, totalling over 540 manuscript pages,…
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Attempted Murder and Swindling Children: Irish Accounts of 19th-Century Belarus
“I have just written the word Kattova, and what think you, Ladys and gentlemen the place is like?” (Martha Wilmot to her mother, 29 June 1804, Royal Irish Academy, Wilmot papers, MS 12L24, p. 216) Today, Belarus is a country relatively few Irish people visit. In the early nineteenth century, however, the region was the westernmost portion of the…