Hi Barbara,
You did ask specifically about Irish history books and Mike has given you plenty there for the next couple of days reading.
However, if you should decide to narrow your focus to books on County Clare you might like to read the following:
"Family and Community in Ireland" by Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball (see
http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/librar ... review.htm ) is a book which is based on a research project in Clare in the 1930s. It is a serious academic work (410 pages) filled with statistics and examples. It takes you back to that era, plonks you down in Clare, takes you across the fields and into farm kitchens and haggards, lets you eavesdrop on farmers' visits to each others houses in the evening, leads you through the streets of Ennis and into the shops and clubs, explains the complex bargaining behind an arranged marriage, describes the place of the elderly in the family and community, and so on and so forth. In a nutshell, it explains why your family developed the way it did. For example, it
- describes family relationships in rural Clare and the town of Ennis and the significance of consanguinity for social relationships;
- explains why your ancestors may or may not have married or married extraordinarily late in life;
- explains the complex unwritten rules under which land was passed from parent to child (and thereby gives you, as a family historian, clues as to which child might have inherited the farm and stayed there and which child(ren) didn't get the farm and would therefore be under pressure to emigrate;
- explains, for example, the social rules under which a shopkeeper in Ennis might hand his shop over to a son (again, key information for the genealogist wondering why Michael didn't inherit his father's shop but left for Australia);
- explains the importance of the extended family as a working unit in the rural West. Strong ties between families in a locality led to close collaboration in daily farming work (e.g harvesting, cutting turf, clearing land of heavy objects).
All in all, the book gives vivid accounts of the kinds of lives your ancestors would have led and so adds flesh to the "bones" of your family tree.
Published by CLASP Press and can be ordered via email to
clasp@clarelibrary.ie
The Strangers Gaze: Travels in County Clare: 1534-1950, edited by Brian O Dalaigh is an anthology which brings together over four centuries of superb accounts of County Clare by visitors from Ireland, Britain, the Continent, Australia and America. These visitors include such notables as Arthur Young, William Thackery and Thomas Carlyle. While their accounts enlighten and entertain, they also provide fascinating insights into the social, religious, and cultural traditions of County Clare. See
http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/librar ... s_gaze.htm
Published by CLASP Press and can be ordered via email to
clasp@clarelibrary.ie
The Antiquities of County Clare: Ordnance Survey Letters, 1839, by John O'Donovan & Eugene Curry is a collection of letters sent back to the Ordnance Survey office in Dublin by Eugene Curry and John O'Donovan as they went about Clare in the early part of the 19th century surveying the county to establish the exact boundaries of townlands, the smallest Irish administrative divisions which had long been in use for public and private transactions but which had never been properly delineated. See
http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/librar ... review.htm
Published by CLASP Press and can be ordered via email to
clasp@clarelibrary.ie
Poverty Before the Famine, County Clare 1835 is based on the First Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for inquiring into the condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland. Required reading. See
http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... _index.htm
Published by CLASP Press and can be ordered via email to
clasp@clarelibrary.ie
Those four will get you going and I'm sure Mike and the other experts in this forum will keep you supplied with titles to read once you have read these.
Paddy