Draws from a wide range of disciplines to bring together 36 leading scholars writing about 400 years of modern Irish history

Since the plantation of Ulster in the 17th century, Northern Irish people have been engaged in conflict - Catholic against Protestant, Republican against Unionist. This text explores the pivotal moments in this history.

Uncovers the transnational movement by Ireland's unionists as they worked to maintain the Union during the Home Rule era. The book explores the political, social, religious, and Scotch-Irish ethnic connections between Irish unionists and the United States as unionists appealed to Americans for support and reacted to Irish nationalism.

This collection of essays brings together exciting, fresh work by young scholars working on vital aspects of modern Irish unionism. Its range is broad, taking in much material (literary, political, cultural, intellectual) which has previously been ignored. Using new and extensive sources, the contributors examine important features of modern unionism and do so in ways which challenge much previous thinking about the subject. The book will be of value to scholars working on any aspect of modern Ireland, and also to students and to a wider public with an interest in Irish history, politics, culture, and society.

Chief Secretary for Ireland in the last months of the Balfour government in 1905, a Unionist leader with many friends and supporters in southern Ireland, and a politician who held ministerial office in the wartime coalition governments, Long had great influence in establishing attitudes toward Ireland. John Kendle shows that whatever hopes Irish Unionists cherished of combatting the home rule movement depended in great part on the support of individuals such as Long. Covering the fifteen years during which Long was closely caught up in Irish affairs, Walter Long, Ireland, and the Union, 1905 1920 provides an analysis of Long's attitudes and actions, and underlines his contribution to the resolution of the political and constitutional dilemma confronting the United Kingdom. Kendle concludes that Long, by advocating a federal solution to Anglo-Irish problems, was a principal architect of the partition of the United Kingdom and the post-1922 constitutional map of the British Isles.

This is the first textbook on the history of modern Ireland to adopt a social history perspective. Written by an international team of leading scholars, it draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches and consistently sets Irish developments in a wider European and global context.