A New History of Ireland is the largest scholarly project in modern Irish history. In 9 volumes, it provides a comprehensive new synthesis of modern scholarship on every aspect of Irish history and prehistory, from the earliest geological and archaeological evidence, through the Middle Ages, down to the present day. The third volume opens with a character study of early modern Ireland and a panoramic survey of Ireland in 1534, followed by twelve chapters of narrative history. There are further chapters on the economy, the coinage, languages and literature, and the Irish abroad. Two surveys, `Land and People', c.1600 and c.1685, are included.

Brimming with vitality and information, Nicholas Furlong's comprehensive A History of County Wexford is an indispensable guide to Wexford's history, culture and people. Furlong starts with Wexford's first settlement and tells the story of Wexford up to the present day, looking at its Gaelic origins, its turbulence during Cromwellian times and its pivotal role in 1798. County Wexford lies in the south eastern corner of Ireland. It is bounded to the west by the River Barrow and the Blackstairs Mountains, to the north by the Wicklow Mountains and by the sea on the other two sides. The River Slaney flows diagonally through the centre, dividing the county north and south. First settled seven thousand years ago, the county has hosted a variety of cultures from Celts to Vikings, Flemish and Normans to English. Historically, it maintained a social, confessional and ethnic mix of populations that was more varied than most other parts of the island. Because of its key strategic position, it has always been militarily important and was the focus of the great rebellion of 1798, the most bloody conflict in modern Irish history. Nicholas Furlong traces the history of the county from its earliest settlements through its Gaelic, Christian, Norse and Norman phases of life to the turbulence of the Elizabethan and Cromwellian regimes. He brings the reader through the great upheaval of 1798 and the institutional revival of Catholicism in the nineteenth century, which was particularly focused on County Wexford. He details the continued prosperity of the county throughout modern times. Driven by the sporting and cultural revival of the 1950s – the birth of the Wexford Opera Festival and the legendary hurling team of that era – Wexford has today built itself into the nation's holiday playground and a vital European transport hub. A History of County Wexford: Table of Contents - County Wexford's First Humans - The Celts and the Age of Iron - The Dawn of Christianity - The Kingdom of Uí Chennselaig - Uí Chennselaig Expands, Norsemen Land - The Vikings in Wexford - Years of Power - Dermot, King of Leinster - The Market for Swords - The New Foreigners - Infestation and Restoration - Art Mór MacMurrough Kavanagh - The World Changes - Havoc and War - From Cromwell to William - Two Kings, Two Bishops - Revolution - A Final Solution - Less Turbulent Years - The Technology Age - War and Peace - ConsolidationEpilogue Our Homeland

Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.

It is widely accepted that no understanding of modern Irish history is complete without an awareness of the significance of events in the seventeenth century. This is true in particular of the Ulster Plantation. Sir Henry Docwra's military expedition, which arrived in Lough Foyle in May 1600, at the height of the Nine Years War, was instrumental in paving the way for James I's Plantation of Ulster that began only a few years later ... after Docwra, the English stayed. The decisive intervention of Docwra's small army brought to an end a conflict whose outcome was crucial in shaping the path of Irish history after 1600. It led also to Docwra bequeathing to us one of the most illuminating military journals in what was to become, even by Irish standards, a war-torn century. His 'Narration of the Services done by the Army Ymployed to Lough-Foyle vnder the leadinge of mee' is not only a fascinating description of Docwra's campaign in the north-west, it can also claim to be the best eyewitness account of a military campaign of the period. Docwra's 'Narration' was first edited and transcribed by the great Irish scholar, John O'Donovan, in 1849. This edition, edited by Billy Kelly, not only includes O'Donovan's comprehensive notes, including translations and descriptions of all the Irish place-names mentioned by Docwra, it also includes insights from more recent scholarship on the Nine Years War. An introduction, new maps, glossaries of terms, a bibliography, chronology and a full index all contribute to making this invaluable and previously scarcely-accessible text available for the general reader as well as being a 'must have' for the many interested in military history.

In the transatlantic world of the late eighteenth century, easterly winds blew radical thought to America. Thomas Paine had already arrived on these shores in 1774 and made his mark as a radical pamphleteer during the Revolution. In his wake followed more than 200 other radical exiles—English Dissenters, Whigs, and Painites; Scottish "lads o'parts"; and Irish patriots—who became influential newspaper writers and editors and helped change the nature of political discourse in a young nation. Michael Durey has written the first full-scale analysis of these radicals, evaluating the long-term influence their ideas have had on American political thought. Transatlantic Radicals uncovers the roots of their radicalism in the Old World and tells the story of how these men came to be exiled, how they emigrated, and how they participated in the politics of their adopted country. Nearly all of these radicals looked to Paine as their spiritual leader and to Thomas Jefferson as their political champion. They held egalitarian, anti-federalist values and promoted an extreme form of participatory democracy that found a niche in the radical wing of Jefferson's Republican Party. Their divided views on slavery, however, reveal that democratic republicanism was unable to cope with the realities of that institution. As political activists during the 1790s, they proved crucial to Jefferson's 1800 presidential victory; then, after his views moderated and their influence waned, many repatriated, others drifted into anonymity, and a few managed to find success in the New World. Although many of these men are known to us through other histories, their influence as a group has never before been so closely examined. Durey persuasively demonstrates that the intellectual ferment in Britain did indeed have tremendous influence on American politics. His account of that influence sheds considerable light on transatlantic political history and differences in religious, political, and economic freedoms. Skillfully balancing a large cast of characters, Transatlantic Radicals depicts the diversity of their experiences and shows how crucial these reluctant émigrés were to shaping our republic in its formative years.