In his treatment of Redmond, Joseph P. Finnan demonstrates the multiple identities of the Irish Parliamentary Party as nationalist, liberal, and Catholic. He looks at Home Rule as part of a federal solution to the Irish question within the United Kingdom, the reasons for the failure of Redmond's war policies, and the collapse of the Irish Parliamentary Party as part of the wider phenomenon of the decline of liberalism during the Great War. As he looks at Irish nationalism in its worldwide context, Finnan also shows how Redmond's handling of organizational problems in America sets the pattern for his later handling of similar problems in Ireland.

In The Lost History of 1914, Jack Beatty offers a highly original view of World War I, testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant assumption that it was inevitable. "Most books set in 1914 map the path leading to war," Beatty writes. "This one maps the multiple paths that led away from it." Chronicling largely forgotten events faced by each of the belligerent countries in the months before the war started in August, Beatty shows how any one of them-a possible military coup in Germany; an imminent civil war in Britain; the murder trial of the wife of the likely next premier of France, who sought détente with Germany-might have derailed the war or brought it to a different end. In Beatty's hands, these stories open into epiphanies of national character, and offer dramatic portraits of the year's major actors-Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas II , Woodrow Wilson, along with forgotten or overlooked characters such as Pancho Villa, Rasputin, and Herbert Hoover. Europe's ruling classes, Beatty shows, were so haunted by fear of those below that they mistook democratization for revolution, and were tempted to "escape forward" into war to head it off. Beatty's powerful rendering of the combat between August 1914 and January 1915 which killed more than one million men, restores lost history, revealing how trench warfare, long depicted as death's victory, was actually a life-saving strategy. Beatty's deeply insightful book-as elegantly written as it is thought-provoking and probing-lights a lost world about to blow itself up in what George Kennan called "the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century." It also arms readers against narratives of historical inevitability in today's world.

Dermot Meleady's authoritative second part of his full-length biography of John Redmond, the first to be published in 80 years, begins in 1901 shortly after his election as chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the Westminster Parliament, and ends with his death in 1918. The book details Redmond's reconstruction of the Party following its reunification after the destructive decade-long Parnell split, and his refashioning of it as a political weapon for winning Irish Home Rule. It follows his role in successfully passing the Conservatives 1903 Land Purchase Act which greatly accelerated the transfer of land ownership from Irish landlords to Irish farmers. His successes and failures in the years of the 1906 10 Liberal Government are also fully documented, but when the Liberals move in 1911 to remove the House of Lords veto, the stage is set for the passage of the third Home Rule Bill, the paramount goal of Redmond s endeavours. The events of the following turbulent five years the increasingly militant resistance of Ulster Unionism to Home Rule, the outbreak of the Great War and the unforeseen Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 as much a blow against Home Rule as against British rule cast him down from triumphant prime-minister-in waiting to the status of Ireland s lost leader. Through exhaustive research in Redmond's personal papers, Dermot Meleady has produced the definitive story of one of the most tragic figures in twentieth-century Irish political history.

In his exploration of the use of intelligence in Ireland by the British government from the onset of the Ulster Crisis in 1912 to the end of the Irish War of Independence in 1921, Grob-Fitzgibbon analyzes the role that intelligence played during those critical nine years.

The first detailed analysis of the legacy of the Irish Parliamentary Party in independent Ireland. Providing statistical analysis of the extent of Irish Party heritage in each Dáil and Seanad in the period, it analyses how party followers reacted to independence and examines the place of its leaders in public memory.

The key turning point in modern Ireland's history, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 has shadowed Ireland's political life for decades. In this first book-length assessment of the treaty in over seventy years, Jason Knirck recounts the compelling story of the nationalist politics that produced the Irish Revolution, the tortuous treaty negotiations, and the deep divisions within Sinn Féin that led to the slow unraveling of fragile party cohesion. Focusing on broad ideological and political disputes, as well as on the powerful personalities involved, the author considers the major issues that divided the pro- and anti-treaty forces, why these issues mattered, and the later judgments of historians. He concludes that the treaty debates were in part the result of the immaturity of Irish nationalist politics, as well as the overriding emphasis given to revolutionary unity. A fascinating story in their own right, the treaty debates also open a wider window onto questions of European nationalism, colonialism, state-building, and competing visions of Irish national independence. Treaty Documents

Explains how the leadership of the IPP operated, taking the concepts of oligarchy and collegiate governance and applying them to the Home Rule case more comprehensively than ever before