This unique book captures the rise of New York's passionately musical Irish Catholics and provides a compelling history of early New York City. The Unstoppable Irish follows the changing fortunes of New York's Irish Catholics, commencing with the evacuation of British military forces in late 1783 and concluding one hundred years later with the completion of the initial term of the city's first Catholic mayor. During that century, Hibernians first coalesced and then rose in uneven progression from being a variously dismissed, despised, and feared foreign group to ultimately receiving de facto acceptance as constituent members of the city's population. Dan Milner presents evidence that the Catholic Irish of New York gradually integrated (came into common and equal membership) into the city populace rather than assimilated (adopted the culture of a larger host group). Assimilation had always been an option for Catholics, even in Ireland. In order to fit in, they needed only to adopt mainstream Anglo-Protestant identity. But the same virile strain within the Hibernian psyche that had overwhelmingly rejected the abandonment of Gaelic Catholic being in Ireland continued to hold forth in Manhattan and the community remained largely intact. A novel aspect of Milner's treatment is his use of song texts in combination with period news reports and existing scholarship to develop a fuller picture of the Catholic Irish struggle. Products of a highly verbal and passionately musical people, Irish folk and popular songs provide special insight into the popularly held attitudes and beliefs of the integration epoch.

How much of what exceptional people achieve can be put down to their own efforts and inner drive, and how much to fate? In this groundbreaking study, the authors argue that the extraordinary achievements of key figures in Irish history were indeed unstoppable - a product of their character and unique way of interacting with the world. In a series of fascinating character studies, Antoinette Walker and Michael Fitzgerald argue that many of those who were crucial to the development of Ireland's political, scientific and artistic traditions - the revolutionaries Robert Emmet, Pádraig Pearse and Éamon de Valera; the scientist Robert Boyle, mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and ethnographer Daisy Bates; and the poet W. B. Yeats and writers James Joyce and Samuel Beckett - would, if they were alive today, be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. The authors examine the character quirks that lead them to believe that all nine can be seen as 'Asperger geniuses'. They assert that this condition meant that all nine were virtually predestined to become exceptional figures in their chosen field and that, moreover, Asperger's syndrome can be seen as the key to genius in all ages and all cultures.

Milner uses music to reveal the history and culture of Irish immigrants in New York, providing fresh insights into their beliefs and struggles.

AV2 Fiction Readalong by Weigl brings you timeless tales of mystery, suspense, adventure, and the lessons learned while growing up. These celebrated children’s stories are sure to entertain and educate while captivating even the most reluctant readers. Log on to www.av2books.com, and enter the unique book code found on page 2 of this book to unlock an extra dimension to these beloved tales. Hear the story come to life as you read along in your own book.

This major new study presents a political and cultural history of some of Ireland's key national theatre projects from the 1890s to the 1990s. Impressively wide-ranging in coverage, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People includes discussions on: *the politics of the Irish literary movement at the Abbey Theatre before and after political independence; *the role of a state-sponsored theatre for the post-1922 unionist government in Northern Ireland; *the convulsive effects of the Northern Ireland conflict on Irish theatre. Lionel Pilkington draws on a combination of archival research and critical readings of individual plays, covering works by J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Lennox Robinson, T. C. Murray, George Shiels, Brian Friel, and Frank McGuinness. In its insistence on the details of history, this is a book important to anyone interested in Irish culture and politics in the twentieth century.

This lavishly illustrated book presents an informed history of the Easter Rising, one of the most significant political episodes in 20th century Irish history.

TRANSLATED BY ALISON McCULLOUGH 'One of the best books on the many diverse migrations to London . . . revealing the extent to which the diversity of immigrant origins has had transformative effects - through food, music, diverse types of knowledge and so much more. The book is difficult to put it down' Saskia Sassen, The Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, New York 'The ultimate book about Great Britain's capital' Dagbladet 'One of the best books of the year! . . . This is a book about what a city is and can be' Aftenposten Is there a street in London which does not contain a story from the Empire? Immigrants made London; and they keep remaking it in a thousand different ways. Nazneen Khan-Østrem has drawn a wonderful new map of a city that everyone thought they already knew. She travels around the city, meeting the very people who have created a truly unique metropolis, and shows how London's incredible development is directly attributable to the many different groups of immigrants who arrived after the Second World War, in part due to the Nationality Act of 1948. Her book reveals the historical, cultural and political changes within those communities which have fundamentally transformed the city, and which have rarely been considered alongside each other. Nazneen Khan-Østrem has a cosmopolitan background herself, being a British, Muslim, Asian woman, born in Nairobi and raised in the UK and Norway, which has helped her in unravelling the city's rich immigrant history and its constant ongoing evolution. Drawing on London's rich literature and its musical heritage, she has created an intricate portrait of a strikingly multi-faceted metropolis. Based on extensive research, particularly into aspects not generally covered in the wide array of existing books on the city, London manages to capture the city's enticing complexity and its ruthless vitality. This celebration of London's diverse immigrant communities is timely in the light of the societal fault lines exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit. It is a sensitive and insightful book that has a great deal to say to Londoners as well as to Britain as a whole.

This book explores how Ireland’s community media outlets reflect and shape identity at the local level. While aspects of its culture date back centuries, the nation-state of Ireland is less than one hundred years old. Because of this and other elements of the island’s history, Irish identity is a contested topic and the island is a place where culture, identity and geography are tightly intertwined. By addressing how community media serve as agents for community building, the book examines how they in turn influence the way individuals connect with their communities.

The years between 1780 and 1830 are vital decades in the history of Irish writing in English. This book charts the confluence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic energies within Irish literary culture and shows how different writers and genres absorbed, dispersed and remade those interests during five decades of political change. During those same years, literature made its own history. By the 1840s, Irish writing formed a recognizable body of work, which later generations would draw on, quote, anthologize and dispute. Questions raised by novels, poems and plays of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the politics of language and voice; the relationship between literature and locality; the possibility of literature as a profession - resonated for many Irish writers over the centuries that followed and continue to matter today. This comprehensive volume will be a key reference for scholars and students of Irish literature and romantic literary studies.

By showing that the meaning of the word politics can be interpreted in various ways, the scope of the articles in Tumult of Images: Essays on W.B. Yeats and Politics is extensive. Rather than explicitly analysing W.B. Yeats's political views and opinions about social order, several of the authors demonstrate how these ideas have determined the textual strategy behind Yeats's works. Thus we find, for instance, how Yeats's politics of myth subsume the myth of politics, or how his play The Player Queen is an expression of sexual and textual politics. Other essays revaluate Yeats's role in Ireland's Literary Renaissance or argue that his recruitment of Homer throughout his work was politically motivated. The volume also offers an ero-political reading of Yeats's ballads next to an analysis of the strategy behind that apocalyptic idea of gyring history. Tumult of Images also deals with the politics of reception of Yeats's works by showing how the Irish poet has influenced South African poetry of the period of Apartheid, or by presenting the various ways in which the Japanese and the Dutch have become acquainted with the work of Yeats. The title of this volume thus reflects not only the many-sidedness of the discussions offered here but also their common contribution to an analysis of a fascinating aspect of Yeats's life and work.