Michael T. Foy

Long overshadowed by fellow republicans Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, Tom Clarke was the man who made the Easter Rising possible. During an extraordinary life dedicated to Irish freedom he rose from humble origins and endured thirty years of struggle, imprisonment and exile before becoming a master conspirator in the Easter Rising. Endowed with a charisma and moral ascendancy, he held together a disparate group of followers and they, in turn, recognised his indispensable leadership by insisting that his name alone should have pride of place on the Proclamation. It was a gesture that, in a sense, guaranteed Clarke immortality; it also proved to be also his death warrant. But death held no terrors for Clarke who was to die satisfied in the belief that, with the sight of a tricolour flying over the GPO, he had changed the course of Irish history.

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.

Looks in depth at Michael Collins's role in the Anglo-Irish War of 1919 to 1921. This book describes Collins' rise to prominence within Irish republicanism after the Easter Rising and, as de facto leader of the IRA and GHQ Director of Intelligence, how he was instrumental in bringing about the Anglo-Irish War.

Challenging many of the widely held assumptions about the Rising, this work illuminates every aspect of the fateful Easter Week. Following an evaluation of the roots of the Rising, the authors challenge the traditional interpretation that the leaders expected military failure.

Fenianism was the Irish separatist movement committed to winning Irish freedom through revolution. Defeated often, its tremendous resilience enabled it to rise time and again, phoenix-like, until it eventually inspired the 1916 Easter Rising, soon followed by an Irish War of Independence that finally established an Irish Free State.The Fenian Rising vividly describes the evolution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and its American counterpart, the Fenian Brotherhood, two revolutionary organisations dedicated to overthrowing British rule in Ireland and establishing an Irish Republic. Led by James Stephens, nineteenth-century Ireland’s most important revolutionary, the IRB rapidly became an increasingly serious threat which Dublin Castle struggled unsuccessfully for years to suppress. Despite Stephens’s downfall in January 1867 the long-anticipated rising followed two months later.In spite of its failure, republicans snatched political victory from the jaws of defeat when in September 1867 the execution of the Manchester Martyrs galvanised every shade of Irish nationalism. Rising from the ashes, the IRB survived to eventually become what one historian has called the most enduring and successful revolutionary secret society in Europe.

Michael Collins is often thought of as Ireland's lost leader: a man born into a revolutionary environment who became a skilled statesman and military leader. This book looks in at Collins' key role in the Anglo Irish War using primary sources which have not previously been available.