Tea at Trianon: When Irish Was Spoken in Pittsburgh

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

When Irish Was Spoken in Pittsburgh

From The Pittsburgh Quarterly:

America’s 19th century Irish immigrants organized to preserve their native language soon after their arrival. Their efforts became “a form of social consciousness and political activism” and “lay the foundation for the Gaelic League” in Ireland, according to a 2019 article in Studi irelandesi, an Irish scholarly journal. The Gaelic League, in turn, reinforced and encouraged the language revival and support for Irish nationalism from America.

In November 1903, Jeremiah McCarthy and other members of the Hazelwood division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Irish Catholic fraternal organization, formed the O’Growney Gaelic Society, named after Rev. Eugene O’Growney, another of the Gaelic League founders. Within months, more than 50 students attended Tuesday and Thursday evening language classes, and Saturday night cultural and history lectures, according to a 1904 full-page feature in the Pittsburgh Gazette.

“I enjoyed McCarthy greatly,” Hyde wrote of the society’s president, a member of the reception committee that greeted him at Pittsburgh’s Union Station. Hyde was given a trolley tour of “significant city sights.” The group of about two dozen people stopped at the Pittsburgh Zoo, opened eight years earlier, and the Duquesne Gardens, then the world’s largest indoor ice skating rink. “As soon as I entered, the band struck up ‘The Wearing of the Green,’” Hyde recorded. (Read more.)