History (3,599 posts)

Kilgannon, DavidIntellectual Disability and Ireland, 1947–1996: Towards a Full Life?, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023. Pp. xii + 246. £24. Pbk. ISBN 978-1-8376-4441-4.

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On 10 November police arrested 18 people for unfurling banners in the town centre, and in January tomatoes and smoke flares were thrown at councillors in the town hall. By mid-February the council had been forced to backtrack and amend its policy to state that they would not discriminate against employees on the basis of sexual orientation.

Mary ‘May’ McGee, who has died at the age of 81 after a short illness, made legal and social history in Ireland when she and her husband Shay won a ­Supreme Court case against the State’s ban on contraception in 1973.

During the winter of 1825, Robert Owen, a rich manufacturer from Wales, gave two addresses, each about three hours long, to joint sessions of Congress. There was, he told the lawmakers, an urgent need to establish “a New System of Society,” one that would be based “upon principles of strict justice and impartial kindness.” Owen condemned the reigning economic order, which he called “the trading system,” as selfish and inhumane at its core. It trained people “to obtain advantages over others,” he argued, and gave “a very injurious surplus of wealth and power to the few” while exacting “poverty and subjection on the many.”

Fat and the Body in the Long Nineteenth Century: Meanings, Measures, and Representations Edited by ShawAmy J.KennedyV. Lynn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025. x plus 278 pp. $60.00).

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Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.

The Confluence Symposium is not a celebration, but rather an acknowledgement of Fort Calgary’s colonialism roots that aims to engender meaning from 150 years of settler history and Indigenous experiences. Above: North West Mounted Police barracks, Fort Calgary, 1891,

Swift’s modest proposal was that the poor breed their children as food for the elites. Tapping into the New World discourse of cannibalism, Swift wrote:
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.