1997
July / August 1997
Cockles & Mussels, Alive, Alive-o!
By Edythe Preet
March/April 1997
"She wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow, crying "cockles and mussels, alive alive o." – From the song, "Mussels and Cockles" that remembers the street vendor, Molly Malone. The Irish have been eating shellfish since humans first set foot on the Emerald Isle. Huge shell piles called middens have been found at every seaside archaeological site, … [Read more...] about Cockles & Mussels, Alive, Alive-o!
Queen of the Klondike
By Gary Blackwood
July/August 1997
After the discovery of gold in the Klondike, 100 years ago, some 100,000 people headed north in search of a quick fortune. Only a handful of them found it, and of that handful, only one was a woman. When Belinda Mulrooney died nearly penniless in a nursing home near Seattle in 1970, few of her neighbors suspected that, seventy years earlier, she was known as the Queen of Grand … [Read more...] about Queen of the Klondike
Mother Teanga
The Irish language has roots stretching back at least 5,000 years and shares words with Sanskrit, the ancient classical language of India. Almost all of us can speak a little Irish and often do. Words like “galore” and “brogue,” for example, or “smithereens” have all passed directly from Irish into English, often with little change to their original pronunciation. So the … [Read more...] about Mother Teanga