The Great Hunger of Ireland: Natural Disaster...

A man stumbles out of the Colorado wilderness in 1873. After his traveling party ran out of food in the dead of winter, he’s the only survivor. Except he looks surprisingly well-fed. Alfred Packer’s story of what became of his companions changes not once, but twice. In the end, w ...  Show more

Does nature or nurture shape who we are? Does our personality come from our genes, or the environment we live in? Countless scientific studies on the subject have been published. But one such study – a collaboration between a psychoanalyst and a New York adoption agency – was ins ...  Show more

In the 1840s, famine hit Ireland with devastating consequences. But what were the circumstances that turned a potato blight into a catastrophe that shattered societal structures and caused around a million deaths? Padraic X Scanlan speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about the causes and i ...  Show more

How did the memory of the Great Famine shape Irish identity? Could it have been prevented? From 1845 to 1852, a disease decimated potato crops across Ireland. Farmers of small plots who relied entirely on this monoculture were launched into complete destitution. Desperate famili ...  Show more

Between 1840 and 1860 the population of New York almost trebled growing from 300,000 to 800,000. This influx of migrants from Europe gave birth to modern Manhattan. At the heart of this story were the 250,000 Irish people who made the city their home in the aftermath of the Gr ...

The legacy of the Great Famine continues to shape not only Ireland, but the Irish diaspora in America, Canada, and the UK. In the mid-1800s, starving families fled the country in search of survival, gathering at the docks to board “coffins ships” sailing to Liverpool and the east ...  Show more