Word: irishness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Irish still refer to the holiday as St. Stephen's Day, and they have their own tradition called hunting the wren, in which boys fasten a fake wren to a pole and parade it through town. Also known as Wren Day, the tradition supposedly dates to 1601, to the Battle of Kinsale, in which the Irish tried to sneak up on the English invaders but were betrayed by the song of an overly vocal wren - although this legend's veracity is also highly debated. Years ago, a live wren was hunted and killed for the parade, but modern sentiments deemed...
Cockrel is aware that much of her potential bid's appeal and challenge lies in her personal narrative. She grew up in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood in the 1950s and '60s - a period when, she recalls, it was populated largely with Irish and Maltese immigrants as well as Puerto Ricans. Her parents managed a soup kitchen. As a student at Wayne State University in the late 1960s, she had a front-row seat to one of the defining moments in Detroit's history: the 1967 riots - or "rebellion," as she recalls it. On the morning of July 23 of that...
...Jenny Sullivan was born Sept. 11, 1962, in Winnetka, Ill., an affluent Chicago suburb. She was the second of five children in a prosperous Irish-Catholic family; her grandfather and great-grandfather co-founded the Skil power-tool company, leaving her a fortune in the millions...
Notre Dame's brainy standards are a big reason it can no longer recruit as many blue-chip players. Even so, diehard Irish fans argue it's important to the student-athlete ethos that top schools be able to compete in Division I football. But they're assuming a real student-athlete ethos still exists at that level, or that Division I football is still a respected institution. It isn't - especially when it chooses its champion via the opaque and convoluted Bowl Championship Series. That's why other prestigious universities that have Division I programs, like Stanford and Northwestern...
...should Notre Dame's. It's great that NBC still broadcasts every Irish home game; it indicates a nostalgic hunger out there for a less cynical college football tradition. But Notre Dame today has an obligation to put its scholarly tradition on its highest pedestal - higher than even its football coach messiahs...