Theodore William Moody (26 November 1907 – 11 February 1984) was a historian from Belfast, Ireland. Background Early life Moody was born in Belfast, to a poor family who made their living from dressmaking and iron turning and was educated from 1920 to 1926 at the Belfast Academical Institution. Moody's parents both belonged to the Plymouth Brethren. As a six-year old in 1913, Moody saw the homes of Roman Catholics living down the street go up in flames during a riot against the Home Rule bill, which left him with a lifelong horror of the sectarian hatreds that so often characterised Irish life. At the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Moody's strongest subjects were the sciences and Latin, but one of his teachers, Archie Douglas turned his attention to history. At the Queen's University Belfast, a professor James Eadie Todd encouraged Moody to pursue graduate studies. In 1930 he went to the Institute of Historical Research in London, and graduated with a PhD in 1934. Moody's doctoral thesis was published as the 1934 book The Londonderry Plantation, 1609–41: the City of London and the Plantation of Ulster. In 1922, the Irish Public Record Office in Dublin was burned down during the course of the Irish Civil War, and as historians have traditionally used government documents, much of Ireland's 17th century history was considered lost. Moody used instead the records of The Honourable The Irish Society as the consortium of companies that granted the right to colonise Ulster in the Derry area together with the papers relating to the plantation of Ulster that were to found the records of the Irish Society. The book was generally ignored in England, but was greeted with welcome reviews in Ireland, as a trail-brazing work that opened up new avenues on studying Irish history. During his time in London, Moody met his future wife Margaret Robertson and often spoke on the subject of Irish history with R. Dudley Edwards. Both Edwards and Moody agreed that the discipline of history in Ireland needed a “revolution” in terms of methodology, goals and style. In 1932, Moody returned to Queen's University to work as a teacher's assistant to Todd, and in 1935 Moody started to deliver lectures himself. In the 1930s he Feeling historians in Ireland worked too much in isolation, Moody founded in February 1936 the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies, and later that same year, Edwards