Lecture | Imagining Independence: Ulster, Ireland and America in 1776
Lecture by Ian McBride exploring the influence of the Scots-Irish, particularly the enlightenment philosopher Francis Hutcheson and his students, on the American Revolution, and tracing the impact of American independence on Ulster.
Date & Time
Saturday, June 13, 2026 @ 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Venue
Booking
Admission is free, with booking essential by e-mailing: admin@armaghrobinsonlibrary.co.uk
Imagining Independence: Ulster, Ireland and America in 1776
The American Revolution transformed the political imagination of Irish people, especially in Ulster, where ties with the colonies were closest.
The Rev. William Campbell of Armagh described the pride of Irish Presbyterians when they heard that their relatives composed ‘the flower of Washington’s army … still, as their fathers had been, the determined enemies of tyranny and arbitrary power, which ever pursued them, and by a strange fatality from the same quarter, England’.
Contemporaries experienced the War of American Independence as a civil war, dividing a proud transatlantic community that regarded itself as Protestant, maritime, commercial and uniquely free.
This lecture begins by exploring the influence of the Scots-Irish, particularly the enlightenment philosopher Francis Hutcheson and his students, on the American Revolution. It then traces the impact of American independence on Ulster, focusing on the Presbyterians who formed the backbone of the Irish Volunteers raised in 1778, and who went on to found the Society of United Irishmen
A lecture in a series of six, Armagh and USA 250, exploring intellectual and historical links between Armagh and early America, highlighting thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, John Locke and Thomas Paine.
Organised by Armagh Robinson Library, Armagh County Museum and Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich Memorial Library & Archive.
Speaker | lan McBride
Ian McBride was born in Keady and educated in Armagh. Since 2016 he has been Foster Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford.
His books include The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (1997) and Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (1998), both short-listed for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize; and Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (2009), a ‘book of the year’ in History Today and the Spectator. He recently finished a book entitled The Origins of the Northern Ireland Peace Process, which will be published by the Royal Irish Academy in November this year. He is currently writing a book on Irish Catholics under the Penal Laws, based largely on archival sources in Rome.
