Publisher Description

Uncovers the transnational movement by Ireland's unionists as they worked to maintain the Union during the Home Rule era. The book explores the political, social, religious, and Scotch-Irish ethnic connections between Irish unionists and the United States as unionists appealed to Americans for support and reacted to Irish nationalism.

Draws from a wide range of disciplines to bring together 36 leading scholars writing about 400 years of modern Irish history

Since the plantation of Ulster in the 17th century, Northern Irish people have been engaged in conflict - Catholic against Protestant, Republican against Unionist. This text explores the pivotal moments in this history.

Lee Smithey examines how symbolic cultural expressions in Northern Ireland, such as parades, bonfires, murals, and commemorations, provide opportunities for Protestant unionists and loyalists to reconstruct their collective identities and participate in conflict transformation.

Reassesses the context in which the state of Northern Ireland was created.

"Published on behalf of the Historical Association of Ireland."

The Ulster Unionist Party: Country Before Party? uses unprecedented access to the party that dominated Northern Ireland politics for decades to assess the reasons for its decline and to analyse whether it can recover. Having helped produce the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) struggled to deliver the deal amid unease over aspects of what its leadership negotiated. Paramilitary prisoner releases, policing changes, and power-sharing with the republican 'enemy' were all controversial. As the UUP leader won a Nobel Peace Prize, his party began to lost elections. For the UUP leadership, acceptance of change was the right thing to do for Northern Ireland - a case of putting country before party. The decades since the peace agreement have seen the UUP eclipsed by the rival Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) even though most of what the UUP agreed in 1998 has remained in place. This book examines the travails of the UUP in recent times. It draws upon the first-ever survey of UUP members and a wide range of interviews, including with the five most recent leaders of the party, to analyse the reasons for its reverses and the capacity to revive. The volume assesses why the UUP's (still sizeable) membership remains loyal and discusses what the UUP and unionism means to those members, in terms of loyalty, policy, national and religious identity, views of other parties and what a shared future in Northern Ireland will constitute. Amid Brexit and talk of a border poll, crises of devolved government, rows with republicans and intra-unionist tensions, how secure and confident does the UUP membership feel about Northern Ireland's future? Written by the same expert team that produced an award-winning book on the DUP, this book is indispensable to understanding parties and political change in divided societies.

H. Montgomery Hyde died in 1989 by which time he had become history. Only a very few remembered him or his gay campaigning role let alone the fact he had been an Ulster Unionist MP throughout the 1950s. Thirty years later, he can hardly be conceptualised. Too many, at best, see him as an aberration for Belfast but he was a recognisable type of progressive yet traditional British politician. No one else played as long or as effective a part in changing the views of people towards gays when only a handful put their head above the parapet. "Harford" as he was known to his friends, "H. Montgomery Hyde" to his readers, and "Montgomery Hyde" to the electors of North Belfast, led the battle in the House of Commons for decriminalisation of homosexuality. And he paid as great a price as any parliamentarian could for his courage - he lost his seat. Very much a child of the 1920s, he was dedicated to researching and writing about those two most prominent gay men of the 20th century - Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement, both Irish outlaws. None the less, he managed to publish another forty books on a wide range of subjects including perhaps his finest works The Rise of Castlereagh and The Other Love. A cheerful and good natured figure, Harford lived and loved well and is deserving, at the least, of this monograph outlining his struggles and achievements.