num_pages: 311
description: [From book jacket cover:]Ireland, ever-confusing and history-haunted, arouses emotions and puzzlement in the rest of the world. Ireland-watchers have long needed an author to analyze the present nature of the society and tell how it got that way--not just the Republic of Ireland, nor just Northern Ireland, bot south and north, Catholic and Protestant, treated as part of the same story. Donald Harman Akenson is that author.The United States and Ireland is not a chronicle of formal diplomatic relations between the two. As the author says in his preface, the most important relations of Americans to Ireland always have been informal, spontaneous, and familial.Instead, this is a book about Ireland, written for general readers in the United States, especially Americans of Irish extraction. Many readers in Canada, Scotland, England, and elsewhere will find it just as rewarding. It will make an ideal text for college courses in modern Irish history or any course in British history that treats twentieth-century Ireland.Mr. Akenson sees the Irish history of the last 150 years as having its watershed in 1920-1923, when three crucial events took place: the southern three-quarters of the island achieved political independence from Great Britain; Northern Ireland was formally separated from the rest of the country; in the south "the revolutionary nationalists fell into a fratricidal conflict, the wounds from which still scar Irish history."The book, accordingly, is in three parts: I. Toward the Watershed; II. Past the Watershed; III. The Future Imperfect: Issues of the Seventies.The story is not always a pleasing one, as all newspaper readers know. The author's purpose is to throw light, not gratify sentiment.
language: English
title: The United States and Ireland
titlecomplete: The United States and Ireland
publisher: Harvard University Press