Through an investigation of the reportage in nineteenth-century English metropolitan newspapers and illustrated journals, this book begins with the question 'Did anti-O'Connell sentiment in the British press lead to "killing remarks," rhetoric that helped the press, government and public opinion distance themselves from the Irish Famine?' The book explores the reportage of events and people in Ireland, focussing first on Daniel O'Connell, and then on debates about the seriousness of the Famine. Drawing upon such journals as The Times, The Observer, the Morning Chronicle, The Scotsman, the Manchester Guardian, the Illustrated London News, and Punch, Williams suggests how this reportage may have effected Britain's response to Ireland's tragedy. Continuing her survey of the press after the death of O'Connell, Leslie Williams demonstrates how the editors, writers and cartoonists who reported and commented on the growing crisis in peripheral Ireland drew upon a metropolitan mentality. In doing so, the press engaged in what Edward Said identifies as 'exteriority,' whereby reporters, cartoonists and illustrators, basing their viewpoints on their very status as outsiders, reflected the interests of metropolitan readers. Although this was overtly excused as an effort to reduce bias, stereotyping and historic enmity - much of unconscious - were deeply embedded in the language and images of the press. Williams argues that the biases in language and the presentation of information proved dangerous. She illustrates how David Spurr's categories or tropes of invalidation, debasement and negation are frequently exhibited in the reports, editorials and cartoons. However, drawing upon the communications theories of Gregory Bateson, Williams concludes that the real 'subject' of the British Press commentary on Ireland was Britain itself. Ireland was used as a negative mirror to reinforce Britain's own commitment to capitalist, industrial values at a time of great internal stress.

The French revolution had an electrifying impact on Irish society. The 1790s saw the birth of modern Irish republicanism and Orangeism, whose antagonism remains a defining feature of Irish political life. The 1790s also saw the birth of a new approach to Ireland within important elements of the British political elite, men like Pitt and Castlereagh. Strongly influenced by Edmund Burke, they argued that Britain's strategic interests were best served by a policy of catholic emancipation and political integration in Ireland. Britain's failure to achieve this objective, dramatised by the horrifying tragedy of the Irish famine of 1846-50, in which a million Irish died, set the context for the emergence of a popular mass nationalism, expressed in the Fenian, Parnell, and Sinn Fein movements, which eventually expelled Britain from the greater part of the island. This book reassesses all the key leaders of Irish nationalism - Tone, O'Connell, Butt, Parnell, Collins, and de Valera - alongside key British political leaders such as Peel and Gladstone in the nineteenth century, or Winston Churchill and Tony Blair in the twentieth century. A study of the changing ideological passions of the modern Irish question, this analysis is, however, firmly placed in the context of changing social and economic realities. Using a vast range of original sources, Paul Bew holds together the worlds of political class in London, Dublin, and Belfast in one coherent analysis which takes the reader all the way from the society of the United Irishman to the crisis of the Good Friday Agreement.

In this sequel to his critically acclaimed King Dan, Patrick Geoghegan examines the latter part of O'Connell's life and career. Daniel O'Connell, often referred to as The Liberator, was an Irish political leader in the first half of the 19th century. One of the most remarkable historical figures in Irish history, he campaigned for Catholic Emancipation, including the right for Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament, and repeal of the Act of Union which combined Great Britain and Ireland.

Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory offers a new, concise interpretation of the history of the Irish in America. Author and distinguished professor Mary Kelly’s book is the first synthesized volume to track Ireland’s Great Famine within America’s immigrant history, and to consider the impact of the Famine on Irish ethnic identity between the mid-1800s and the end of the twentieth century. Moving beyond traditional emphases on Irish-American cornerstones such as church, party, and education, the book maps the Famine’s legacy over a century and a half of settlement and assimilation. This is the first attempt to contextualize a painful memory that has endured fitfully, and unquestionably, throughout Irish-American historical experience.

Dramatic and tragic rescues of arrested Fenian leaders, the formation of a Fenian squad to engage in assassinations of suspected informers and policemen, the bombing of a London prison that brought death and destruction to a neighbouring street, public executions of several Fenians, the quality of British justice, and the struggle to develop counter-terrorism policies and an effective system of intelligence form the core of The Fenian Problem. Brian Jenkins adds new information to the established narrative of the movement, arguing that it resorted to terrorism in its pursuit of Irish independence.

Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument explores the history of the 1840s Irish Famine in visual representation, commemoration and collective memory from the 19th century until the present, across Ireland and the nations of its diaspora, explaining why since the 1990s the Famine past has come to matter so much in our present.