In this vivid fifty-year history of Germany from 1871-1918—which inspired events that forever changed the European continent—here is the story of the Second Reich from its violent beginnings and rise to power to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. Before 1871, Germany was not yet nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France—all without destroying itself in the process? In this unique study of five decades that changed the course of modern history, Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. This often startling narrative is a dramatic tale of national self-discovery, social upheaval, and realpolitik that ended, as it started, in blood and iron.

A New History of Ireland is the largest scholarly project in modern Irish history. In 9 volumes, it provides a comprehensive new synthesis of modern scholarship on every aspect of Irish history and prehistory, from the earliest geological and archaeological evidence, through the Middle Ages, down to the present day. Volume VI opens with a character study of the period, followed by ten chapters of narrative history, and a study of Ireland in 1914. It includes further chapters on the economy, literature, the Irish language, music, arts, education, administration and the public service, and emigration.

Ireland and Germany is a study in the reciprocal literary relations of Ireland and Germany from the Middle Ages to the present day. After an initial survey of their literary and cultural relations before 1700, the literary impact of each culture upon the other during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is separately surveyed and analysed in terms of national image, literary fortune, literary influence, and creative reception. A concluding reference section lists some 600 German translations of nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish writing.

The Easter Rising of 1916 had a lasting effect upon Ireland, with many viewing it as a watershed in the history of modern Ireland and concurring with Yeats that a «terrible beauty was born». Seeking to clarify the state of nationalist opinion in the period before the Rising, Genesis of the Rising is as much an undertaking in social psychology as it is a social and political history. It strives to debunk many longstanding theories, most significantly the turning of the tide thesis, which asserts that British blunders in the wake of the failed Rising turned the tide in public opinion toward the course envisioned by the Rebels. Genesis of the Rising contends that as early as 1912, with the introduction of the Third Home Rule Bill, through the start of the Great War, and right up to Easter 1916, the tide in nationalist opinion had been turning, albeit silently, and that the Rising was a catalytic force that accelerated an already ongoing process. It reveals a dichotomy in nationalist opinion between covert views and misleading, overt opinion when it suggests that it was the Rising and the executions that subsequently forced nationalist opinion to show its true colors. In effect, the tide had begun to turn long before Easter 1916; and constitutional nationalism, as represented by the Third Home Rule Bill and the Irish Parliamentary Party, was giving way to some aspect of physical-force nationalism.