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For Ireland the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were an era marked by war, economic transformation, and the making and remaking of identities. By the 1630s the era of wars of conquest seemed firmly in the past. But the British civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century fractured both Protestant and Catholic Ireland along lines defined by different combinations of religious and political allegiance. Later, after 1688, Ireland became the battlefield for what was otherwise Britain's bloodless (and so Glorious) Revolution. The eighteenth century, by contrast, was a period of peace, permitting Ireland to emerge, first as a dynamic actor in the growing Atlantic economy, then as the breadbasket for industrialising Britain. But at the end of the century, against a background of international revolution, new forms of religious and political conflict came together to produce another period of multi-sided conflict. The Act of Union, hastily introduced in the aftermath of civil war, ensured that Ireland entered the nineteenth century still divided, but no longer a kingdom.
With a perfect balance of playfulness, humor, and apology, Philip Brady calls himself a bard. But he explains that, before the title became shrouded in mystery, bards were simply teachers, unknown and poor, who gave literal voice to poems through recitations. Woven throughout these twenty essays is Brady's resistance to the academic expectations and settings of poetic instruction, enabling him to elicit the most authentic and surprising responses from a range of voices. He is motivated by the possibility of poetry expressed in the grittiest of places and takes readers from the rust belts of Ohio, to the far-flung pubs of Ireland, to Zairian classrooms with few books and fidgety lightbulbs. M...
Building a railroad through the Appalachians and rugged Pennsylvania territory, John Carlysle battles ruthless thugs hired by politicians and finds himself torn betweem the woman he loves and his burgeoning railroad empire.
This is the story of a boy's growing up on the Great Blasket, a sparsely inhabited, Gaelic-speaking island off the coast of Ireland. It tells of the simple life of a society that no longer exists, with a humor and poetry refreshingly remote from the modern world that replaced it.