The Irish

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A book in the best tradition of popular history—the untold story of Ireland's role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe. • The perfect St. Patrick's Day gift! Every year millions of Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they may not be aware of how great an influence St. Patrick was on the subsequent history of civilization. Not only did he bring Christianity to Ireland, he instilled a sense of literacy and learning that would create the conditions that allowed Ireland to become "the isle of saints and scholars"—and thus preserve Western culture while Europe was being overrun by barbarians. In this entertaining and compelling narrative, Thomas Cahill tells the story of how Europe evolved from the classical age of Rome to the medieval era. Without Ireland, the transition could not have taken place. Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization -- copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, while libraries and learning on the continent were forever lost—they brought their uniquely Irish world-view to the task. As Cahill delightfully illustrates, so much of the liveliness we associate with medieval culture has its roots in Ireland. When the seeds of culture were replanted on the European continent, it was from Ireland that they were germinated. In the tradition of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, How The Irish Saved Civilization reconstructs an era that few know about but which is central to understanding our past and our cultural heritage. But it conveys its knowledge with a winking wit that aptly captures the sensibility of the unsung Irish who relaunched civilization.

The Irish Cookbook showcases the true depth of Irish cuisine, its ingredients, and its fascinating history, as never before Ireland's remarkably rich food heritage dates back millenia and, in The Irish Cookbook, acclaimed chef Jp McMahon captures its unique culinary origins and varied influences. Irish food is the summation of what the land and sea gives; the book's 480 home-cooking recipes celebrate the range and quality of Ireland's bounty, from oysters and seaweed on its west coast to beef and lamb from its lush green pastures, to produce and forage from throughout the island. Presenting best-loved traditional dishes together with many lesser-known gems, this book vividly evokes the warmth, hospitality, and culinary spirit of the Emerald Isle.

'...from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ‘path breaking,’ ‘seminal,’ ‘essential,’ a ‘must read.’ How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.

'These legends are the action-packed stories - of ancient heroes, huge battles, attempted invasions, prophecies and spells, clashes between the underworld and the real world, abductions, love affairs and feasts - which have fascinated the Irish mind for more than 2,000 years . . . Most of them have an extraordinary, stark narrative sweep, with a marvellous sense of detail . . . Heaney writes directly and fluently . . . with great tact and skill.' Sunday Times

Winner, 2010 Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book, American Conference on Irish Studies Renowned as one of the most brilliant satirists ever, Jonathan Swift has long fascinated Hibernophiles beyond the shores of the Emerald Isle. Sean Moore's examination of Swift's writings and the economics behind the distribution of his work elucidates the humorist's crucial role in developing a renewed sense of nationalism among the Irish during the eighteenth century. Taking Swift's Irish satires, such as A Modest Proposal and the Drapier's Letters, as examples of anticolonial discourse, Moore unpacks the author's carefully considered published words and his deliberate drive to liberate the Dublin publishing industry from England's shadow to argue that the writer was doing nothing less than creating a national print media. He points to the actions of Anglo-Irish colonial subjects at the outset of Britain's financial revolution; inspired by Swift's dream of a sovereign Ireland, these men and women harnessed the printing press to disseminate ideas of cultural autonomy and defend the country's economic rights. Doing so, Moore contends, imbued the island with a sense of Irishness that led to a feeling of independence from England and ultimately gave the Irish a surprising degree of financial autonomy. Applying postcolonial, new economic, and book history approaches to eighteenth-century studies, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution effectively links the era's critiques of empire to the financial and legal motives for decolonization. Scholars of colonialism, postcolonialism, Irish studies, Atlantic studies, Swift, and the history of the book will find Moore's eye-opening arguments original and compelling.

How the Irish Revolution was shaped by international actors and events The Irish War of Independence is often understood as the culmination of centuries of political unrest between Ireland and the English. However, the conflict also has a vitally important yet vastly understudied international dimension. The Irish Revolution: A Global History reassesses the conflict as an inherently transnational event, examining how circumstances and individuals abroad shaped the course Ireland’s struggle for independence. Bringing together leading international scholars of modern Ireland, its diaspora, and the British Empire, this volume discusses the Irish revolution in a truly global sense. The text situates the conflict in the wider context of the international flourishing of anti-colonial movements following World War I. Despite the differences between these movements, their proponents communicated extensively with each other, learning from and engaging with other revolutionaries in anti-imperial metropoles such as Paris, London, and New York. The contributors to this volume argue that Irish nationalists at home and abroad were intimately involved in this exchange, from mobilizing Ireland’s vast diaspora in support of Irish independence to engaging directly with radical causes elsewhere. The Irish Revolution is a vital work for all those interested in Irish history, providing a new understanding of Ireland’s place in the evolving postwar world.

The problems of modern Ireland have attracted the attention of many British political leaders from Gladstone to Major. Attempts to formulate a 'solution' have been governed by the British perception of what the problem is, and by the structures, as well as the ideas of British party politics and British political life: Ireland was never a laboratory in which dispassionate political experiments could be conducted. Modern Ireland has been shaped by British policy, and this has itself been influenced by British political habits and traditions, social and economic reforms, and new governmental institutions have been applied by politicians both of the left and the right. The 'Framework Documents' represent the latest attempt to achieve what Gladstone, David Lloyd George and Neville Chamberlain sought, and failed to achieve: a lasting settlement of the political divisions within Ireland, and between Ireland the Great Britain. This book places the Irish question in the wider context of the history of the British Isles, and thus seeks to explain its special place in British history as the 'Oldest Question', and as a question for contemporary Britain. Fully revised and with a new chapter to bring the analysis up to 1996, this new edition of Professor Boyce's work will be widely acclaimed.

A brilliant true crime account of the assassinations that altered the course of Irish history from the “compulsively readable” writer (The Guardian). One sunlit evening, May 6, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially made surgeon’s blades. They put an end to the new spirit of goodwill that had been burgeoning between British Prime Minister William Gladstone and Ireland’s leader Charles Stewart Parnell as the men forged a secret pact to achieve peace and independence in Ireland—with the newly appointed Cavendish, Gladstone’s protégé, to play an instrumental role in helping to do so. In a story that spans Donegal, Dublin, London, Paris, New York, Cannes, and Cape Town, Julie Kavanagh thrillingly traces the crucial events that came before and after the murders. From the adulterous affair that caused Parnell’s downfall; to Queen Victoria’s prurient obsession with the assassinations; to the investigation spearheaded by Superintendent John Mallon, also known as the “Irish Sherlock Holmes,” culminating in the eventual betrayal and clandestine escape of leading Invincible James Carey and his murder on the high seas, The Irish Assassins brings us intimately into this fascinating story that shaped Irish politics and engulfed an Empire. Praise for Julie Kavanagh’s Nureyev: The Life “Easily the best biography of the year.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “The definitive biography of ballet’s greatest star whose ego was as supersized as his talent.” —Tina Brown, award-winning journalist and author