The Act of Union, coming into effect on 1 January 1801, portended the integration of Ireland into a unified, if not necessarily uniform, community. This volume treats the complexities, perspectives, methodologies and debates on the themes of the years between 1801 and 1879. Its focus is the making of the Union, the Catholic question, the age of Daniel O'Connell, the famine and its consequences, emigration and settlement in new lands, post-famine politics, religious awakenings, Fenianism, t...

Britannia's Zealots, Volume I opens the first longitudinal study to examine the Conservative Right from the late-19th century to the present day. British Conservatism has always contained a significant section fundamentally opposed to progressive reform. A permanent minority in Parliament, dissident right-wing Conservatives nevertheless had allies in the press and sympathy among grassroots party members enabling them to create crises in the media and at party meetings.N.C....

A brilliantly researched and vividly written history of the English Civil Wars, from one of Britain's most prominent Civil War historiansThe sequence of civil wars that ripped England apart in the seventeenth century was the single most traumatic event in this country between the medieval Black Death and the two world wars. Indeed, it is likely that a greater percentage of the population were killed in the civil wars than in the First World War.This sense o...

Definitive, concise, and very interesting... From William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, the Very Interesting People series provides authoritative bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures - people whose influence and importance have stood the test of time. Each book in the series is based upon the biographical entry from the world-famous Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The Very Interesting People series includes the following titles: 1.William Sha...

From medieval Runnymede to twentieth-century Jarrow, from King Alfred to George Orwell by way of John Lilburne and Mary Wollstonecraft, a rich and colourful thread of radicalism runs through a thousand years of British history. In this fascinating study, Edward Vallance traces a national tendency towards revolution, irreverence and reform wherever it surfaces and in all its variety. He unveils the British people who fought and died for religious freedom, universal suffrage, justice and lib...

To an extraordinary extent everyone in Britain still lives under the shadow of the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688. It was a massive, brutal and terrifying event, which completely changed the governments of England, Scotland and Ireland and which was only achieved through overwhelming violence. Revolution brilliantly captures the sense that this was a great turning point in Britain's history, but also shows how severe a price was paid to achieve this.

The late seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary turbulence and political violence in Britain, the like of which has never been seen since. Beginning with the Restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War, this book traces the fate of the monarchy from Charles II's triumphant accession in 1660 to the growing discontent of the 1680s. Harris looks beyond the popular image of Restoration England revelling in its freedom from the austerity of Puritan rule under a merry monarch and ...

The Great Hunger, Tom Mac Intyre's internationally celebrated play of 1983, and The Gallant John-Joe, his most recent dramatic work, show Mac Intyre to be one of the most daringly and excitingly original Irish writers working today. The Great Hunger is Mac Intyre's version of Patrick Kavanagh's long poem of the same name. It represents the life and dreams of Patrick Maguire, Monaghan small farmer and potato-gatherer, a man suffering from sexual and spiritual starvation. The play fuses imag...

The elusive search for stability is the subject of Professor D. George Boyce's Nineteenth-Century Ireland, the fifth in the New Gill History of Ireland series. Nineteenth-century Ireland began and ended in armed revolt. The bloody insurrections of 1798 were the proximate reasons for the passing of the Act of Union two years later. The 'long nineteenth century' lasted until 1922, by which the institutions of modern Ireland were in place against a background of the Great War, the Ulster rebe...

Anyone studying or teaching Irish history, or who likely to be involved in discussions on the subject, should first get the facts straight. It is my aim to provide, as far as possible, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about one particular period.This book is a companion to my other book Pre-Famine Ireland: Social Structure. I had accumulated such a vast quantity of material, often from untouched sources, that I was unable to include it in one volume of reasona...

This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the 'first industrial revolution'. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty yea...