Author Talk, “Black Powder, White Lace: The Irish Community at Hagley”

In 2014, I gave an invited lecture at Hagley Museum and Library, the nation’s leading center for the history of business and technology. The topic was based on my 2002 book, Black Powder, White Lace: the du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in 19th Century America. A videorecording can be found here: https://www.hagley.org/librarynews/video-black-powder-white-lace-du-pont-irish-and-cultural-identity-nineteenth-century

In the Past Lane: interview

In this 2018 podcast, Rethinking and Remembering: The 1898 Wilmington, NC Massacre and Coup, I talk with Ed O’Donnell about my book, Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in Wilmington, NC.  In the 1990s, I was involved in a public history initiative to commemorate the centennial of the massacre and coup. As O’Donnell says, my work “stirred a lot of controversy because it challenged the convenient cover story for what happened in November 1898 by demonstrating that it was a naked and calculated act of white supremacist political violence.That experience prompted Mulrooney to write Race, Place, and Memory to examine the long sweep of the city’s history to reveal many incidents of white supremacist violence, both before and after 1898, that were either forgotten or misremembered. It’s both a history of a representative southern city and a consideration of the role of public history in fostering an accurate vision of the past and insights into the challenges facing American society in the present.”