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"400 United Irishmen and fellow-rebels brought the spirit of Irish rebellion "down under" in the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 - and changed Australia forever. At Castle Hill in 1804, this "army of shadows" carried on where they left off but during Bligh's overthrow in 1808, they stood back from a fight that was not theirs. The "political Irish" played a central role in the developing colony. Their professions, trades and skills made them useful as clerks, storekeepers and teachers, and fitted them to be overseers and constables, and helped bring self-sufficiency to the still-fragile colonial economy. They remained revolutionaries; only they negotiated change rather than raised warlike rebellion. Through their open defiance and quiet manipulation of authority, the harp "new strung" resonates to this day in the Australian ethos that United Irishmen helped to create." -- book cover.
The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.