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Emmet Larkin was one of the major modern historians of Ireland and sup- porter of Irish studies in the United States. Born in New York on May 19,1927, he served in the U.S. army at the end of World War II. His family was from County Galway in Ireland, and his father had been involved in the Irish war of independence of the early 1920s. He received his BA in history in 1950 from New York University and his PhD in history from Columbia University in 1957. His first academic interest resulted in his book, James Larkin, Irish Labour Leader, 1876-1947 (Cambridge, MA, 1965). He taught at Brooklyn College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to the University of Chicago in 1966 where he served as professor of British and Irish history until his retirement in 2006.
As a scholar Dr. Larkin's great contribution was in investigating the role of the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Ireland. His ground-breaking arti- cle, "The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75,"x argued that the Irish people as a people only became practicing Catholics in the full sense outlined by the Council of Trent after the famine of the 1840s.This was the time when Sunday Mass attendance rates and reception of the sacraments soared to levels maintained until the late-twentieth century. It was also the time of the institutional consolidation of Catholicism under Cardinal Paul Cullen with the building of new churches and the founding of religious, educational, and med- ical institutions.
In 1972 this seemed like a...