Catherine Nealy Judd – författare

Ireland’s Great Famine generated Western Europe’s most devastating social crisis of the nineteenth century, a crisis that created enormous and transformational upheaval. In Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine: Politics, Tourism, and Scandal, 1845-1853, author Catherine Nealy Judd proposes that a new literary genre emerged from the crucible of the Great Famine, that is, the Irish Famine travelogue. In her keenly argued and thoroughly researched book, Judd contends that previous scrutiny of Famine travel narratives has been overly broad, peripheral, or has tended to group Famine travelogues into an undi erentiated whole. Judd invites us to consider Famine-era travel narratives as comprising a unique subgenre within the larger discursive - eld of travel literature. Here Judd argues that the immensity of the Famine exerted great pressure on the form, topics, themes, and goals of Famine-era travelogues, and for this reason, Famine travel narratives deserve detailed and organized consideration, as well as critical recognition of their status as an unprecedented subgenre. Drawing on an extensive array of underutilized sources, Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine adumbrates the Irish Famine travelogue canon.

In this book, Catherine Nealy Judd demonstrates the profound significance of a U.S military siege rashly launched from Fort Kearny against a small war party of Northern Cheyenne. This event occurred on the Platte River Road in August 1856 and triggered four Cheyenne reprisal counterattacks. Drawing on history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, military records, governmental archives, diaries, letters, and other primary sources, Judd scrutinizes a tumultuous moment in the pre-railroad expansionist era, presenting her readers with a tale of struggle between Indigenous Americans and an increasingly aggressive federal military stationed at the forts of the Plains. As Judd scrutinizes the causes, conduct, and consequences of this long-neglected series of events, her insights encourage us to reassess the trajectories of federal aggression and of an Indigenous response to that bellicosity. By placing the Cheyenne Nation at the center of the history of the Overland Trail, this study offers a long overdue reinterpretation of the Platte River Road in the 1850s and beyond.