Enfilade

From NYU’s Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies:

The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: The Voice of an Irish Community Abroad
The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, 25 October 2013 — 1 April 2014

More than two hundred and fifty years ago—in the midst of the world’s first global war—an Irish wine ship returning home from the French port of Bordeaux was captured at sea by a British warship. In January 2011, the mailbag from that ship, the Two Sisters of Dublin, was discovered by a New York University professor. These letters, most of them only recently opened for the first time, are the basis of a major exhibition in the Mamdouha S. Bobst Gallery at New York University’s Bobst Library — The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: The Voice of an Irish Community Abroad.

Drawing on world-class collections of art and never-before-seen historical documents, the exhibition takes you back to a time when thriving communities of Irishmen played a prominent role on the European continent. The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters reconstructs the early years of the Seven Years’ War, tells the story of the fateful voyage of the Two Sisters of Dublin, and underscores the significance of the Irish presence in Europe and America. The heart of the exhibit is the extraordinary collection of letters discovered in 2011. Through them, the voice of an Irish community abroad comes alive, and we enter into a private and intimate world inhabited by ordinary men and women separated from their homeland by war.