Series 1 - William Coyne letter

117pp

Kerby A. Miller received the photocopied Coyne letter and typed transcript in 1987 from Roger Haydon, then editor of Cornell University Press, with no restrictions on use. Haydon purchased the original manuscript from a postal history dealer.

Materials pertaining to a letter written by William Coyne, a Protestant manufacturer in Belfast, to his brother Henry Coyne in Duchess County, New York on St Patrick's Day, 1817. Included are a copy of the original letter, typed transcripts, Kerby A. Miller's correspondence with donors and colleagues, research notes, contemporary newspaper clippings, and a copy of Miller's 'Forging a Protestant Way of Life': Class Conflict and the Origins of Unionist Hegemony in Early Nineteenth-Century Ulster', which is based on Coyne's letter. Miller also based his essay, 'Belfast's First Bomb, 28 February 1816: Class Conflict and the Origins of Unionist Hegemony' on the letter and found it to be of great historical significance due to its descriptions of violent class conflict between Belfast's cotton manufacturers and their illegally-unionised Protestant cotton weavers following the Napoleonic wars, the conditions of which, according to Miller, 'were instrumental in generating mass migration by the Irish poor to America and Britain.'