商品詳細

A New History of Ireland, from the earliest times to the present, is a harvesting of modern scholarship on its subject. It consists of nine volumes by over a hundred contributors, mainly historians but including historical geographers and specialists in other such related disciplines as language and literature, the visual arts, and music. Seven of the volumes are text, and deal with politics as well as economic, social, and cultural history. The other two volumes contain reference material. This, the seventh text volume to appear, concludes the text volumes of A New History of Ireland, of which the first (volume III: Early Modern Ireland 1534-1691) was published in 1976. Volume VII, covering the period 1921 to 1984, completes the series' coverage of Irish history from prehistoric times to the twentieth century. It opens with a character study of the period, followed by fourteen chapters of narrative history, covering both parts of Ireland. There are additional chapters on the economy, literature in English and Irish, the Irish language, the visual arts, music, the mass media, education, emigration and immigration, and the position of women from the 1860s to the 1980s.Two surveys of 'Land and People', c. 1926 and c.1983 are included , and the volume ends with an extensive bibliography for the period 1921-84, covering both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The two ancillary volumes contain reference material. The period covered by this volume is of major significance in the history of modern Ireland. It witnessed the coming into effect of the partition (following the Government of Ireland Act of 1920) and the establishment, in the wake of the war of independence and the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty, of the Irish Free State. From this point on, although the Free State did not formally become a republic until 1948, the political evolution of the two parts of Ireland followed separate paths. The period ends with the New Ireland Forum of 1984, which reflected the willingness of the Irish Republic to look in new ways at future relations between all the people of the island, and which was followed by the historic Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985. The twenty-five contributors to this volume, all specialists in their field, provide the most comprehensive treatment of these developments of any single-volume survey of twentieth-century Ireland.