Roscommon was a land hungry county. The landless rose in large numbers and declared they would rather be shot than starved. Their opposition and brutality was directed against those evicting their tenants or ëtaking-upí land from which another had been evicted. By depleting the ranks of the landless labourers, the famine eased the pressure on the land supply and broke the resolve of the ëdisaffectedí.

It May Be Forever is a nineteenth century tale of adventure and tragedy, based upon the real-life story of Michael Quinn. To escape the grinding poverty of Irelands Great Famine, Michael and his family flee to England, where at age eight, Michael becomes a child laborer in a textile mill. As he grows older and more aware of British prejudice and discrimination, he is motivated to enlist with the Fenian rebels, a group determined to free Ireland from British colonial rule. Chronic unemployment, however, drives him to America, and defeat on the battlefield lands him on the untamed plains of the Wild West. Faced with unaccustomed opportunity, Michael quickly abandons the fight against oppression and turns away from family and friends. Dreams of achieving a great fortune lead him to support the dispossession of Native Americans of their lands and livelihood. But after the massacre at Wounded Knee, demons of conscience rise up in terrible nightmares, and only a Lakota holy man offers the hope of redemption. It May Be Forever is a cautionary tale, which shows how the many small decisions of life can create the most unintended consequences, and how easily a man of strong convictions may become that which he hates. Visit David Quinns website: www.davidquinnbooks.com.

Ireland’s Great Famine produced Europe’s worst refugee crisis of the nineteenth century. More than 1.5 million people left Ireland, many ending up in Canada. Among the most vulnerable were nearly 1,700 orphaned children who now found themselves destitute in an unfamiliar place. The story Canada likes to tell is that these orphans were adopted by benevolent families and that they readily adapted to their new lives, but this happy ending is mostly a myth. In Finding Molly Johnson Mark McGowan traces what happened to these children. In the absence of state support, the Catholic and Protestant churches worked together to become the orphans’ principal caregivers. The children were gathered, fed, schooled, and placed in family homes in Saint John, Quebec, Montreal, Bytown, Kingston, and Toronto. Yet most were not considered members of their placement families, but rather sources of cheap labour. Many fled their placements, joining thousands of other Irish refugees on the Canadian frontier searching for work, extended family, and the opportunity to begin a new life. Finding Molly Johnson revisits an important chapter of the Irish emigrant experience, revealing that the story of Canada’s acceptance of the famine orphans is a product of national myth-making that obscures both the hardship the children endured and the agency they ultimately expressed.

Why riot? Against whom? For what? Riotous Assemblies is an account of Irish riots, urban and rural, across Ireland from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century.

This edited volume provides a cross-section of the cutting-edge ways in which archaeologists are developing new approaches to their work with communities and other stakeholder groups who have special interest in the uses in the past.