This book is a 'home front' study of Ireland during the Crimean War, which analyses how the various strands of Irish society responded to the conflict's events, issues and impacts and how they memorialised it as part of the British Empire.

Murphy's is the first book to evaluate all levels of Irish involvement in the Crimean War (1854-6). In this assessment, Murphy shows that the Irish formed a large part of the British army and the Royal Navy during that war. He explores the role of Irish men and women in the support services and other capacities, such as chaplains, engineers, navvies, and medical personnel; and he discusses the level of Irish public interest in the war, and the impact of the Crimean War on Irish society in the 1850s. Murphy is a graduate of U. College, Dublin, and Trinity College, Dublin, and is currently working on the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography. The book is distributed by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

William Monsell, first Baron Emly of Tervoe (1812-94) is one of the most significant yet also one of the most overlooked political figures of nineteenth century Ireland. His political career spanned sixty years, starting in the 1830s when Daniel O'Connell was at the height of his powers, until the 1890s, when Eamon de Valera was a boy. Monsell's extraordinary life saw him move from being an Anglican Tory to a Catholic Liberal and his dual conversion was greatly influenced by the terrible events of the Great Famine. His long period in the House of Commons (1847-74) was marked by service in a number of administrations under four Prime Ministers. He was the most prominent lay Catholic in Ireland and the chief spokesman for a large and influential, but now forgotten political group, the Catholic Unionists. He was also the key liaison between the British establishment and the Irish Catholic Bishops. This rich contextual biography offers a challenging re-appraisal of the received picture of nineteenth-century Ireland. It is a fascinating portrait of a man whose entire political life was devoted to reconciling the various dilemmas inherent in his ideology. He was a Liberal Catholic devoted to an authoritarian Church, a reforming landlord opposed to the land agitation of the 1880s and 1890s and a patriotic Irishman who staunchly supported the union with Britain. Catholic, Liberal and Unionist; Irishman, Briton and adopted Frenchman; friend of Gladstone, Gavan Duffy and of Pope Pius IX; of Cardinal Newman, Lord Acton and of Cardinal Cullen, William Monsell was a major player in Ireland, Britain and Europe for many decades, whose undeserved slide into obscurity is reversed in this fascinating book.

"Christopher Klein's fresh telling of this story is an important landmark in both Irish and American history." —James M. McPherson Just over a year after Robert E. Lee relinquished his sword, a band of Union and Confederate veterans dusted off their guns. But these former foes had no intention of reigniting the Civil War. Instead, they fought side by side to undertake one of the most fantastical missions in military history: to seize the British province of Canada and to hold it hostage until the independence of Ireland was secured. By the time that these invasions--known collectively as the Fenian raids--began in 1866, Ireland had been Britain's unwilling colony for seven hundred years. Thousands of Civil War veterans who had fled to the United States rather than perish in the wake of the Great Hunger still considered themselves Irishmen first, Americans second. With the tacit support of the U.S. government and inspired by a previous generation of successful American revolutionaries, the group that carried out a series of five attacks on Canada--the Fenian Brotherhood--established a state in exile, planned prison breaks, weathered infighting, stockpiled weapons, and assassinated enemies. Defiantly, this motley group, including a one-armed war hero, an English spy infiltrating rebel forces, and a radical who staged his own funeral, managed to seize a piece of Canada--if only for three days. When the Irish Invaded Canada is the untold tale of a band of fiercely patriotic Irish Americans and their chapter in Ireland's centuries-long fight for independence. Inspiring, lively, and often undeniably comic, this is a story of fighting for what's right in the face of impossible odds.

Please note that the maps available in the print edition do not appear in the ebook. From "the great storyteller of modern Russian historians," (Financial Times) the definitive account of the forgotten war that shaped the modern age The Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale—these are the enduring icons of the Crimean War. Less well-known is that this savage war (1853-1856) killed almost a million soldiers and countless civilians; that it enmeshed four great empires—the British, French, Turkish, and Russian—in a battle over religion as well as territory; that it fixed the fault lines between Russia and the West; that it set in motion the conflicts that would dominate the century to come. In this masterly history, Orlando Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence. Drawing on untapped Russian and Ottoman as well as European sources, Figes vividly depicts the world at war, from the palaces of St. Petersburg to the holy sites of Jerusalem; from the young Tolstoy reporting in Sevastopol to Tsar Nicolas, haunted by dreams of religious salvation; from the ordinary soldiers and nurses on the battlefields to the women and children in towns under siege.. Original, magisterial, alive with voices of the time, The Crimean War is a historical tour de force whose depiction of ethnic cleansing and the West's relations with the Muslim world resonates with contemporary overtones. At once a rigorous, original study and a sweeping, panoramic narrative, The Crimean War is the definitive account of the war that mapped the terrain for today's world..

Infectious disease, wounded and dying soldiers, and a shortage of supplies were the daily realities faced by the nuns who nursed with Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War. This study documents their involvement in the conflict and how the nuns bore witness to the effects of carnage and official indifference, in many cases traumatized as a result. This book reflects on the initiative and courage shown by the nuns and how their actions can be viewed as part of a wider movement among women in the mid-19th century to find fulfilment and assert control in their own lives. Nightingale's Nuns and the Crimean War also sheds light on how critics at the time accused many of the nuns of being secret agents of the Catholic Church who preyed on vulnerable soldier patients; there was a campaign in parliament to regulate and control convents. Terry Tastard shows how the nuns attempted to neutralize this anti-Catholicism, as well as charting the participation of Anglican nuns who had just begun an astonishing project to revive the religious life in the Church of England. Finally the book reveals new insights into Florence Nightingale's relationships with the nuns who nursed with her in Crimea and how these experiences impacted Nightingale's own perspective.