William Smith O Brien And The Young Irelander Rebellion Of 1848

Ireland's revolution of 1848 has no proud place in the history of Irish nationalism, and the leader of the doomed enterprise, William Smith O'Brien, is not a celerated hero of his country's struggle for independence. Nevertheless, the O'Brien story is an important one. During most of his political career, O'Brien believed in the British Parliament's capacity to give good government in Ireland. His attempts to secure liberal reform were largely unseccessful, however, and he entered the 1840's with a growing conviction that the Irish Members were wasting their time at Westminster. In 1843, his extroardinary Commons campaign for justice for Ireland prefigured the tactics of Parnell, but the effort ended in disappointment and O'Brien joined the Repeal Association in October 1843. For the next five years he was a major political figure, first as O'Connell's loyal deputy, then as his critic and rival, and finally, in 1848, as the leader of a rebellion. O'Brien was an exceptionally brave politician whose sense of honor and duty sent him into the lion's den time and time again. However, his ignominious failure in 1848 meant that he could be despised by men who were not his betters- by British leaders who failed to govern well, and by Irish politicians, including many who called temselves nationalists, who did not share his attachmnent to the idea that they should govern themselves. -- Publisher description

A vivid local history recounting the excitement and tumult in Limerick during the year of the failed Young Ireland Rebellion.

"Thomas Keneally recounts history with the uncanny skill of a great novelist whose only interest is to lay bare the human heart in all its hope and pain. As he was able to do in Schindler's List, he shows us in The Great Shame a people despised and rejected to the point of death, who in the face of all their sorrows manage to keep their souls. This story of oppression, famine, and emigration--a principal chapter in the story of man's inhumanity to man--becomes in Keneally's hands an act of resurrection; Irishmen and Irishwomen of a century and a half ago live once more within the pages of this book." --Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization In the nineteenth century, Ireland lost half of its population to famine, emigration to the United States and Canada, and the forced transportation of convicts to Australia. The forebears of Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List, were victims of that tragedy, and in The Great Shame Keneally has written an astonishing, monumental work that tells the full story of the Irish diaspora with the narrative grip and flair of a great novel. Based on unique research among little-known sources, this masterly book surveys eighty years of Irish history through the eyes of political prisoners--including Keneally's ancestors--who left Ireland in chains and eventually found glory, in one form or another, in Australia and America. We meet William Smith O'Brien, leader of an uprising at the height of the Irish Famine, who rose from solitary confinement in Australia to become the Mandela of his age; Thomas Francis Meagher, whose escape from Australian captivity led to a glittering American career as an orator, a Union general, and governor of Montana; John Mitchel, who became a Confederate newspaper reporter, gave two of his sons to the Southern cause, was imprisoned with Jefferson Davis--and returned to Ireland to become mayor of Tipperary; and John Boyle O'Reilly, who fled a life sentence in Australia to become one of nineteenth-century America's leading literary lights. Through the lives of many such men and women--famous and obscure, some heroes and some fools (most a little of both), all of them stubborn, acutely sensitive, and devastatingly charming--we become immersed in the Irish experience and its astonishing history. From Ireland to Canada and the United States to the bush towns of Australia, we are plunged into stories of tragedy, survival, and triumph. All are vividly portrayed in Keneally's spellbinding prose, as he reveals the enormous influence the exiled Irish have had on the English-speaking world. "A terrible and personal saga, history delivered with a scholar's density of detail but with the individualizing power of a multi-talented novelist." --William Kennedy

The most original and stimulating interpretation of the politics of the Irish Free State to be published in decades." Ronan Fanning, Sunday Independent "This is an excellent study, firmly grounded in original research, which sheds new light on this period." Fearghal McGarry, Irish Historical Studies

Examines why Young Ireland attached such importance to the writing of history, how it went about writing that history, and what impact their historical writings had.

A brilliant writer, outstanding orator, and charismatic politician, Thomas D'Arcy McGee is best known for his prominent role in Irish-Canadian politics, his inspirational speeches in support of Canadian Confederation, and his assassination by an Irish revolutionary who accused him of betraying his earlier Irish nationalist principles. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the first volume in a two-part biography, explores the development of those principles in Ireland and the United States. David Wilson follows McGee from Wexford, Ireland across the Atlantic to Boston, where at nineteen he became the editor of America's leading Irish newspaper, and traces his subsequent involvement with the Young Ireland movement, his reactions to the Famine, and his role in the Rising of 1848. Wilson goes on to examine McGee's experiences as a political refugee in the United States, where his increasing disillusionment with revolutionary Irish nationalism and his opposition to American nativism propelled him towards conservative Catholicism and sent him on a trajectory that ultimately led to Canada - his experiences are the subject of volume 2, Thomas D'Arcy McGee: The Extreme Moderate, 1857-1868.

Spanning over 2 centuries, James Gregory's Mercy and British Culture, 1760 -1960 provides a wide-reaching yet detailed overview of the concept of mercy in British cultural history. While there are many histories of justice and punishment, mercy has been a neglected element despite recognition as an important feature of the 18th-century criminal code. Mercy and British Culture, 1760-1960 looks first at mercy's religious and philosophical aspects, its cultural representations and its embodiment. It then looks at large-scale mobilisation of mercy discourses in Ireland, during the French Revolution, in the British empire, and in warfare from the American war of independence to the First World War. This study concludes by examining mercy's place in a twentieth century shaped by total war, atomic bomb, and decolonisation.