Donald Harmon Akenson

Life
1941- ; Canadian academic with study interest in the Irish overseas, espec. the Ulster Irish frontiersmen; biographer of Conor Cruise O’Brien; gave Joanne Goodman Lectures of the University of Western Ontario, 1997; author of Small Differences: Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics, 1815-1922 (1988) which analyses the similarities between Protestants and Catholics both at home and abroad and examines the importance attached to those ‘small differences’; also If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730 (1997).

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Works
  • The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education [in the Nineteenth Century] (London: Routledge & K. Paul 1970).
  • The Church of Ireland: Ecclesiastical Reform and Revolution, 1800-1885 (Yale UP 1971).
  • The United States and Ireland (Harvard UP 1973); Education and Enmity: The Control of Schooling in Northern Ireland, 1920-50 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles 1973).
  • A Mirror to Kathleen’s Face: Education in Independent Ireland, 1922-1960 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP 1975).
  • Local Poets and Social History: James Orr, Bard of Ballycarry (Belfast: PRONI 1977).
  • Between Two Revolutions: Islandmagee, County Antrim 1798-1920 (Ontario: P. D. Meaney; Dublin: IAP 1979).
  • A Protestant in Purgatory: Richard Whately, Archbishop Of Dublin (Conn: Archon Books 1981).
  • ed., Vol. 4, Canadian Papers in Rural History (Ontario: Langdale Press 1984).
  • The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP 1984).
  • Being Had: Historians, Evidence, and the Irish in North America (Ontario: P. D. Meany, 1985).
  • Small Differences: Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics, 1815-1922 (McGill-Queen’s UP 1988; rep. McGill-Queen’s UP; Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1991).
  • Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand 1860-1950 (Victoria UP 1991), 260pp.
  • God’s People, Convenant and Land in S. Africa, Israel and Ulster (Cornell UP 1992,1993).
  • The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Belfast: IIS 1993, 1994), 329pp.
  • Conor: Anthology (McGill-Queen’s UP 1994), 356pp.
  • Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien (McGill-Queen’s UP 1994), 574pp.; If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730 (Liverpool UP 1997), xi, 273pp.

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