This book collects the proceedings of a conference held jointly in Belfast and Dublin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Rebellion of 1798. It covers all aspects of the 1798 Rebellion, its manifestations in Ireland and its international context. There will be essays on the United Irishmen abroad in Australia and the United States following the failure of the Rebellion. This volume features the work of leading historians of the period and is intended to open as many windows as possible on the causes, contexts, circumstances and consequences of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

Forgetful Remembrance examines the paradoxes of what actually happens when communities persistently endeavour to forget inconvenient events. The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants -- and in particular Presbyterians -- repeatedly tried to repress over two centuries discomfiting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798. By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and more subtle rituals of remembrance that facilitated muted traditions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing. Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative references demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories have been concealed behind a veil of supposed oblivion.