Aspirations of social mobility and anti-Catholic discrimination were the lifeblood of subversive opposition to British rule in Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century. Refugees of the Great Famine who congregated in ethnic enclaves in North America and the United Kingdom supported the militant Fenian Brotherhood and its Dublin-based counterpart, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), in hopes of one day returning to an independent homeland. Despite lackluster leadership, the movement was briefly a credible security threat which impacted the history of nations on both sides of the Atlantic. Inspired by the failed Young Ireland insurrection of 1848 and other nationalist movements on the European continent, the Fenian Brotherhood and the IRB (collectively known as the Fenians) surmised that insurrection was the only path to Irish freedom. By 1865, the Fenians had filled their ranks with battle-tested Irish expatriate veterans of the Union and Confederate armies who were anxious to liberate Ireland. Lofty Fenian ambitions were ultimately compromised by several factors including United States government opposition and the resolution of volunteer Canadian militias who repelled multiple Fenian incursions into New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba. The Fenian legacy is thus multi-faceted. It was a mildly-threatening source of nationalist pride for discouraged Irish expatriates until the organization fulfilled its pledge to violently attack British soldiers and subjects. It also encouraged the confederation of Canadian provinces under the 1867 Dominion Act. In this book, Patrick Steward and Bryan McGovern present the first holistic, multi-national study of the Fenian movement. While utilizing a vast array of previously untapped primary sources, the authors uncover the socio-economic roots of Irish nationalist behavior at the height of the Victorian Period. Concurrently, they trace the progression of Fenian ideals in the grassroots of Young Ireland to its de facto collapse in 1870s. In doing so, the authors change the perception of the Fenians from fanatics who aimlessly attempted to free their homeland to idealists who believed in their cause and fought with a physical and rhetorical force that was not nonsensical and hopeless as some previous accounts have suggested. PATRICK STEWARD works in the Mayo Clinic Development Office in Rochester, Minnesota. He obtained a Ph.D. in Irish History at University of Missouri under the direction of Kerby Miller. Patrick additionally holds two degrees from Tufts University and he was a strategic intelligence analyst at the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington, D.C. early in his professional career. BRYAN MCGOVERN is an associate professor of history at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. He is author of the widely praised 2009 book John Mitchel, Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist and has written various articles, chapters, and book reviews on Irish and Irish-American nationalism.

In this groundbreaking narrative, historian, investigative journalist and filmmaker Peter Vronsky uncovers the hidden history of the Battle of Ridgeway and explores its significance to Canada’s nation-building myths and traditions. On June 1, 1866, more than 1,000 Fenian insurgents invaded Canada across the Niagara River from Buffalo, N.Y. The Fenians were mostly battle-hardened Civil War veterans; the Canadian troops sent to fight them came from a generation that had not seen combat at home for more than 30 years. Led by inexperienced upper-class officers, the volunteer soldiers were mostly young, some as young as 15 years old. They were farm boys, shopkeepers, apprentices, schoolteachers, store clerks and two rifle companies of University of Toronto students hastily called out from their final exams. Many had not fired live rounds from their rifles even once. When they fought the Fenians near the village of Ridgeway the next day, a single rifle company of 28 students took the brunt of a counter-attack by 800 insurgents and suffered the most killed and wounded. The events of June 2, 1866, were covered up by the Macdonald government. The story was falsified so thoroughly that most Canadians today have not heard of the first modern battle in which Canadians died.

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HOT pants to Mohican haircuts, glam rock to punk, Monty Python to Kojak, the three-day week to Thatcher...A Scottish new town in the 1970s is the playground for teenage sweethearts Lorna and Robert and their unforgettable band of friends - and foes.Among the concrete warrens, they discover loyalty and betrayal, booze and bullies, triumph and tragedy.And, like all youngsters growing up anytime, anywhere, they spend an awful lot of time inventing sex.But for Lorna and Robert, their lives are changed - perhaps forever - when they are torn apart by a deathbed promise and bitter sectarian divide.Fast forward 25 years to Blair's Britain at the start of the new millennium when they suddenly come back into each other's lives in a very different world of fast-changing technology, international terrorism and the advent of social media. With a trail of broken marriages, personal damage and self-doubt in their wake - not to mention that dying vow still haunting them - they face up to the biggest question of their lives.What if you got a second chance to put right your biggest regret?

Jeremiah O Donovan Rossa died on 29th June 1915 at Staten Island, New York. On hearing of his death, Tom Clarke sent an urgent telegram from Dublin to John Devoy in New York, with the simple message: Send his body home at once . His funeral in Glasnevin Cemetery on 1st August that year was one of the largest political funerals in Irish history, and is now accepted as the precursor to the Easter Rising. Patrick Pearse famously declared at Rossa s graveside, The fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead! And while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace! In this first and long-awaited biography of a hugely significant figure in Irish history, Shane Kenna examines the life of Jeremiah O Donovan Rossa. From modest origins in West Cork, he became passionately interested in national politics from an early age, and was later arrested for his republican activities. He then spent time in the toughest of British prisons, and was actually elected to the British House of Commons while still in prison. Exiled to the United States, he continued his involvement in republican organisations such as Clann Na Gael and set up the United Irishman newspaper. From the United States he organised, funded, and masterminded the Fenian dynamite campaign which was the first ever Irish bombing operation on British shores. O Donovan Rossa was a complex character who was both a family and a political man. This book tells his story from the earliest years to his death and funeral - a figure whose life work was dedicated to the establishment of an Irish Republic.

"Established in 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood was a secret, oath-bound movement dedicated to bringing about revolution in Ireland. This book is a result of a major conference to mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and includes essays on Fenianism in its diasporic, transnational and imperial context; political violence; republican ideology and popular politicisation; culture, religion and identity; and memory and commemoration. This is the first publication to consider Fenianism as the truly international phenomenon it represented and includes essays from international scholars assessing the impact of Fenianism - a movement founded in America by the Irish immigrant community - throughout Ireland, Britain, continental Europe, the Americas and Australasia. The book spans the full chronological range of Fenian movement, from its origins in the aftermath of the Young Ireland movement, through its existence as a mass revolutionary movement in the 1860's, the long period as an underground revolutionary conspiracy, culminating in its role as the driving force of the Irish revolution between 1916 and 1921. "

Demonstrates that separatist thinking in Ireland was crucial even when the political focus was on home rule. This book analyses Fenian influences on Irish nationalism between the Phoenix Park murders of 1882 and the Easter Rising of 1916. It challenges the convention that Irish separatist politics before the First World War were marginaland irrelevant, showing instead that clear boundaries between home rule and separatist nationalism did not exist. Kelly examines how leading home rule MPs argued that Parnellism was Fenianism by other means, and how Fenian politics were influenced by Irish cultural nationalism, which reinforced separatist orthodoxies, serving to clarify the ideological distance between Fenians and home rulers. It discusses how early Sinn Fein gave voice to these new orthodoxies, and concludes by examining the ideological complexities of the Irish Volunteers, and exploring Irish politics between 1914 and 1916. Dr MATTHEW KELLY is British Academy Research Fellow and Lecturer in Modern British History at Hertford College, University of Oxford.