Margaret Skinnider (circa 1893-1971) was born in Scotland to Irish parents. She trained as a teacher and taught mathematics in Glasgow, Scotland, before resigning her position to go to Dublin to take part in the Easter Rising of April 1916. Skinnider's Doing My Bit for Ireland, published in the United States in 1917, is her account of her revolutionary activities in 1915 and 1916. She begins by telling the story of her first trip to Dublin, in 1915, when she smuggled detonators for bombs into Ireland for use by the nationalists. This is followed by a more extensive narrative of her role in the Easter Rising. Skinnider carried ammunition, served as a dispatch rider, and was a sniper. After spending seven weeks in the hospital recovering from three gunshot wounds suffered in the uprising, she managed to avoid arrest and to make her way back to Glasgow. During a brief return to Ireland in August 1916, she was trailed by a detective and fled to the United States, where in 1917-18 she campaigned for the cause of Irish independence. The book is illustrated and contains, in addition to Skinnider's narrative, facsimile copies of important documents relating to the events of April 1916, including the proclamation of an Irish republic by the provisional government, stamps issued by the republic during its brief existence, the last proclamation issued by Padraic Pearse, president of the republic, and Pearse's surrender document of April 29, 1916. The book concludes with the lyrics to the songs sung by Irish volunteers before and after the Easter Rising. After her stay in the United States, Skinnider returned to Ireland and was active in the Cummann na mBan, the women's auxiliary to the Irish Republican Army.

Concerned chiefly with views and events of the 19th and 20th centuries. Discusses deviations from a putative ideal of femininity characterised by chastity and inactivity.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness. Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.

On Easter Monday, between 1,000 and 1,500 Irish Volunteers and members of the Irish Citizen Army seized the General Post Office and other key locations in Dublin. The intention of their leaders, including Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, was to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent thirty-two county Irish republic. For a week battle raged in the Irish capital until the Rising collapsed. The rebel leaders were executed soon afterwards, though in death their ideals quickly triumphed. lluminating every aspect of that fateful Easter week, The Easter Rising is based on an impressive range of original sources. It has been fully revised, expanded and updated in the light of a wealth of new material and extensive use has been made of almost 2,000 witness statements that the Bureau of Military History in Dublin gathered from participants in the Rising. The result is a vivid depiction of the personalities and actions not just of the leaders on both sides but the rank and file and civilians as well. The book brings the reader closer to the events of 1916 than has previously been possible and provides an exceptional account of a city at war.