‘Global Dimensions of Irish Identity’

Sir, – I was delighted to see that my new book, The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity, was considered worthy of review in The Irish Times (Weekend Review, July 11th).

In that book, I argue that by “connecting the world-scattered Irish, newspapers provided the intellectual basis for an international imagined community”.

That thesis is based on my reading of thousands of pages of newsprint and hundreds of personal letters exchanged between Irish-born people living in Ireland, Australia, and the United States between 1840 and 1880. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that historians regularly differ on points of analysis and book reviewers are free to not like, believe, or understand the contents of any book.

David Fitzpatrick's claim that I left my statistical evidence on newspaper circulation "unsourced", however, is simply not true. In academic lingo, the term "unsourced" implies that the reviewer searched the footnotes in vain for detailed information on the exact historical sources the author employed to find those statistics. In fact, footnote 16 of chapter five shows that I cited my evidence according to the strictest scholarly conventions. The statistics appeared in George P Rowell's The Men Who Advertise (New York, 1870), pages 665 and 701. It is right there at the top of the footnote! How could Fitzpatrick have possibly missed it?

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To falsely claim that a professional historian’s evidence was “unsourced” threatens to undermine their scholarly reputation in the eyes of unwary readers. Thank you for allowing me to set the record straight. – Yours, etc,

CIAN T McMAHON, PhD

University of Nevada,

Las Vegas.