Leinster is one of the most successful and influential Irish sporting teams of all time. The team boasts a dazzling roster of players, past and present, including Brian O’Driscoll, Johnny Sexton, Jamie Heaslip and current captain James Ryan.But there is so much more to rugby in Leinster, and, for the first time, this book compiles the rich history of the sport in the province, from its origins in the school and university teams, through the amateur years, with the growth of clubs t...

The organization of several thousand Irish American men into a military outfit, which then attempted to invade Canada from within the United States, is a significant historical event that remains largely unexplored from an Irish and Irish American perspective. This study offers a fuller exploration of the details behind the Fenian invasion, asking why Irish immigrants were motivated to shape American international policy and examining the ways in which the Fenians defined identity as a tra...

The first full-scale biography of Canada’s first prime minister in half a century by one of our best-known and most highly regarded political writers.The first volume of Richard Gwyn’s definitive biography of John A. Macdonald follows his life from his birth in Scotland in 1815 to his emigration with his family to Kingston, Ontario, to his days as a young, rising lawyer, to his tragedy-ridden first marriage, to the birth of his political ambitions, to his commitment to the all-but-...

Canadians of Scottish descent, who today total over 4.7 million, have never made up more than 16 per cent of Canada’s population. Yet they have supplied thirteen of twenty-two Canadian prime ministers, and have made proportionate contributions in exploration, education, banking, military service, railroading, invention, literature, you name it.Award-winning author Ken McGoogan has written a vivid, sweeping narrative showcasing more than sixty Scots who have shaped Canada. They incl...

In his first work of nonfiction, bestselling novelist James Webb tells the epic story of the Scots-Irish, a people whose lives and worldview were dictated by resistance, conflict, and struggle, and who, in turn, profoundly influenced the social, political, and cultural landscape of America from its beginnings through the present day.More than 27 million Americans today can trace their lineage to the Scots, whose bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the bor...

The contrarian historian and analyst upends the conventional reading of the American RevolutionIn 1775, iconoclastic historian and bestselling author Kevin Phillips punctures the myth that 1776 was the watershed year of the American Revolution. He suggests that the great events and confrontations of 1775—Congress’s belligerent economic ultimatums to Britain, New England’s rage militaire, the exodus of British troops and expulsion of royal governor...

Staking Claims to a Continent is a highly readable examination of how Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Sir John A. Macdonald took part in a daring game of nation building that has impacted the global order to the present day.Three political leaders presided over the reshaping of the North American continent during the fiery 1860s. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were both born in Kentucky, Davis in June 1808 and Lincoln the following February. Joh...

The exodus from England that gathered pace during the 19th century accounted for the greatest part of the total emigration from Britain to Canada. And yet, while copious emigration studies have been undertaken on the Scots and the Irish, very little has been written about the English in Canada.Drawing on wide-ranging data collected from English record offices and Canadian archives, Lucille Campey considers why people left England and traces their destinations in Ontario and Quebec....

'Australian governments find it easy to go to war. Their leaders seem to be able to withdraw with a calm conscience, answerable neither to God nor humanity.' Australia lost 600 men in the Boer War, a three-year conflict fought in the heart of Africa that had ostensibly nothing to do with Australia. Coinciding with Federation, the war kickstarted Australia's commitment to fighting in Britain's wars overseas, and forged a national identity around it. By 1902, when the Boer War ended, a mytho...

Now a major documentary film starring Billy BraggIn the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the British Government banished their political enemies - viewed with the same alarm as today's 'terrorists' - to the shores of Australia. Sent as convicts to the other side of the world, these political prisoners included liberals, democrats and republicans; machine breakers, food rioters, trade unionists and Chartists; radical journalists and intellectuals; Irish revolutionaries, Scot...

The impact of the British Empire on the history of the Upper Ottawa Valley is explored through the experiences of early emigration-assisted 19th-century Scottish immigrants.Between 1815 and 1832, Great Britain settled more than 3,500 individuals, mostly from the Scottish Lowlands, in the Ottawa Valley. These government-assisted emigrations, which began immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, are explored to reveal their impact on Upper Canada.Seeking to transform their lives...

More than 27 million Americans today can trace their lineage to the Scots, whose bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and later in the bitter settlements of England's Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland.When hundreds of thousands of Scots-Irish migrated to America in the eighteenth century, they brought with them not only long experience as rebels and outcasts but also unparalleled skills as frontiersmen and guerr...