My name is Maiah O’Rourke, and I am one of the sixteen participants in this program. I come from a small town just outside of Madison called Stoughton and attended McFarland High School. It was there that my passion for history and really all things social science flourished, as I had wonderful teachers and the opportunity to be a part of many programs such as Badger Girls State and Model United Nations. Other than school, I enjoy playing tennis, watching A Game of Thrones, eating as much ice cream as possible and traveling. I have a labradoodle named Cricket, and two cats named Mittens and Jellybean (I named them when I was eight…). At UW-Madison, I hope to double major in Spanish and something else, though I am not sure what that something else is just yet. I am considering a variety of things including journalism, international relations, or history.
On another note, I have a very Irish last name. Though Ireland is just one of many places that my melting-pot ancestry includes, my grandparents have done a great job of researching and tracing back our lineage to one of the first O’Rourkes who came to the U.S. in the 1840s, and was a descendant of the O’Rourke dynasty. He was born in Sligo, Ireland, which is just next to the county Leitrim. Before the region was broken up into the counties we now know today, the O’Rourkes ruled a kingdom known as Breifne which includes the counties Leitrim and Cavan (and bits of others as well). The power of the O’Rourkes and their titles changed many times over the course of history. Family history in the country is just one of the many reasons I chose to participate in this program.
In this study abroad experience, I hope to better understand the long conflict between Ireland and Great Britain in order to form an opinion better based on facts rather than just emotions. Through this better understanding, I also hope to look at the U.S. revolution against Great Britain from a new perspective and shed light on how that determined U.S. history and really, world history as a whole. In history classes I took later in my high school career, I came to the realization that one cannot study history as a linear continuation of isolated events. Rather, we need to study a variety of historical eras, events and ideas at the same time and compare and contrast to realize that so much of our history is so much more interconnected than we may have originally thought. Everything happens for a reason, and I expect this study abroad experience will help me better understand the reasons behind this conflict. What better way to study history than to directly immerse oneself in it?