The nationalist journalists, later known as Young Ireland, who founded the Nation newspaper in 1842, proclaimed their intention ‘to create and foster public opinion and make it racy of the soil’. This desire to forge a deeply rooted national consciousness inevitably involved looking back at Ireland's history, and drawing strength and inspiration from the achievements and sacrifices of the past. Ireland, the Nation insisted, had a noble record of cultural distinction and courageous resistance that should be a matter of pride to all its people, regardless of their political allegiances. It bemoaned popular ignorance of Irish history, arguing that it undermined Ireland's claims to nationhood: ignorance was the mark of the slave, while the freeman knew of the heroes and patriots who had gone before him and strove to live up to their ideals and sacrifices. The Nation maintained that a sustained campaign of national education was needed to overcome such ignorance, and warned that ‘if the people do not persevere with a dogged and daily labour for knowledge and independence they will be slaves for generations’.

The leading role in all of this was taken by Thomas Davis, one of the founders of the Nation, and its driving force until his death in 1845. Davis believed that overturning centuries of neglect and falsification in the writing of Irish history was an essential first step in creating a true sense of nationhood, and maintained that the primary objective of Irish literary effort should be ‘to furnish Irishmen the true history of their country’ and to inspire them with ‘a new and informed patriotism’. He was determined to refute the misrepresentations of hostile historians who he claimed had made the Irish look on their past with shame by writing a version of history that falsely contrasted England's grandeur with the chaotic squabbling of the Irish: ‘Our bravery they have called turbulence, our resistance rebellion, our virtue barbarity … This must be undone before we can be a nation’. Davis and his Nation colleagues were intent therefore on countering such dismissive imperialist polemic with a coherent narrative of the Irish past that showed it had as much pattern and purpose as that of any other country. This in turn would, they hoped, encourage its people to see themselves as the inheritors of a proud and glorious past, and inspire them to pursue their political independence in the present.