When John Redmond declared ‘No Irishman in America living 3,000 miles away from the homeland ought to think he has a right to dictate to Ireland’ the Irish leader unwittingly made a rod for his own back. In denying the newly-established United Irish League of America any input into party policy formulation, Redmond risked alienating the nation’s largest diaspora should a home rule crisis ever occur. That such a situation developed in 1914 is an established fact. That it was the product of Redmond’s own naivety is open to conjecture. ‘Home Rule from a Transnational Perspective: The Irish Parliamentary Party and the United Irish League of America, 1901-1918’ explores the Irish Party’s subordination of its American affiliate in light of the ultimate demise of constitutional nationalism in Ireland. This book fills a void in Irish American studies. To date, research in this field has been dominated by Clan na Gael and the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, particularly the transatlantic links that underpinned the Easter Rising in 1916. Little attention has been paid to the Irish party’s efforts to manage the diaspora in the years preceding the insurrection or to the individuals and organisations that proffered a more moderate solution to the age-old Irish Question. Breaking new ground, it offers a fresh and interesting perspective on the fall of the Home Rule Party and helps to explain the seismic shift towards a more radical approach to gaining independence. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Irish America, diaspora studies, Irish independence, and/or home rule. It complements the existing historiography and enhances our knowledge of a largely understudied aspect of Irish nationalism.

Contains the Society's meetings, proceedings, etc.

In this important work of deep learning and insight, David Brundage gives us the first full-scale history of Irish nationalists in the United States. Beginning with the brief exile of Theobald Wolfe Tone, founder of Irish republican nationalism, in Philadelphia on the eve of the bloody 1798 Irish rebellion, and concluding with the role of Bill Clinton's White House in the historic 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, Brundage tells a story of more than two hundred years of Irish American (and American) activism in the cause of Ireland. The book, though, is far more than a narrative history of the movement. Brundage effectively weaves into his account a number of the analytical themes and perspectives that have transformed the study of nationalism over the last two decades. The most important of these perspectives is the "imagined" or "invented" character of nationalism. A second theme is the relationship of nationalism to the waves of global migration from the early nineteenth century to the present and, more precisely, the relationship of nationalist politics to the phenomenon of political exile. Finally, the work is concerned with Irish American nationalists' larger social and political vision, which sometimes expanded to embrace causes such as the abolition of slavery, women's rights, or freedom for British colonial subjects in India and Africa, and at other times narrowed, avoiding or rejecting such "extraneous" concerns and connections. All of these themes are placed within a thoroughly transnational framework that is one of the book's most important contributions. Irish nationalism in America emerges from these pages as a movement of great resonance and power. This is a work that will transform our understanding of the experience of one of America's largest immigrant groups and of the phenomenon of diasporic or "long-distance" nationalism more generally.