The Starvation of a Man: Terence MacSwiney and Famine Memory (original) (raw)

In the fall of 1920, daily newspapers around the world told the story of the starvation of a man. The death of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, on October 25, 1920, the seventy-fourth day of his hunger strike in England's Brixton prison, spurred an unprecedented level of collective mourning in the Irish diaspora; as such, it remains a unique event in Irish and Irish American history. More than a million people, in Ireland and around the world, gathered on streets, in churches, and in stadiums to mourn the famished body of this republican mayor. These gatherings supported the nationalist cause at the height of the fi ghting in the Anglo-Irish War. The evocation of hunger and starvation at a time of national crisis also tapped into deep memories of Irish famine, particularly the catastrophic Famine of 1845-52. The mourning took the form of processional marches, with or without MacSwiney's body, in London,

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