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City prepares to mark 400th `birthday`
4 November 2009
Belfast is preparing to mark the 400th anniversary of its foundation as a city.
The city`s first charter was signed by James I on 27 April 1613.
This charter established the first Belfast corporation, established markets and enabled parliamentary representation, as well as the appointment of the city`s first `sovereign` the precursor of the modern Lord Mayor - John Vesey, that year.
This is a key date in the history of the city and it is important that understanding of the event`s meaning and its commemoration is shared and owned by all the people of Belfast, commented the city`s present Lord Mayor, Councillor Naomi Long.
On Wednesday 4 November Belfast City Council hosted a symposium, to help understand the events which lead to the charter, Belfast`s relationship to the Plantation and the wider international context of events at the time.
The symposium, at the Ulster Hall, and the distinguished panel of speakers featured:
Professor John Belchem, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University of Liverpool;
Dr Audrey Horning, Reader in Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester;
Dr Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, Director of the American Indian Resource Center at the College of William and Mary in Virginia;
Professor Tony Gallagher, Head of the School of Education at Queen`s University; and
Buck Woodard, Manager of the American Indian Initiative at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Virginia and a Muskogee Creek tribal member.
Among the subjects discussed were:
how Liverpool celebrated its 800th anniversary;
the engagement of native peoples with the commemoration of the 1607 foundation of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, which is frequently compared, then and now, to what was happening in Ulster;
the comparative archaeology of north America and Ulster, and how the physical evidence sometimes challenges our assumptions;
the broader Irish historical context in which the Plantation happened - and also why Belfast features so little in most accounts of that story.
One of the speakers, Dr Audrey Horning, commented:
As we look to the future, we also need to revisit what we think we know about the past. History can still surprise. Anniversaries allow us to be open to those hidden or forgotten pasts and to reconsider their meaning in the present and for the future."
ENDS
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