From That Small Island: The Story of the Irish

An ambitious and richly illustrated global history of Ireland that accompanies the internationally broadcast From that Small Island TV series.Who are the Irish? Where did they come from? Where did, and do they, go? Some seven million people live on the island of Ireland, but over eighty million people worldwide say they are Irish. What does that mean? What does the story of a small island people in their comings and their goings tell us about identities and belonging in a constantly changing world?From That Small Island: The Story of the Irish is a global and ambitious retelling of Irish history that explores these questions to ask how Ireland has been shaped by the world and the world has been shaped by the Irish. From the island's earliest settlers more than 12,000 years ago to today and from Europe and North America to Asia, Africa, and South America, Bríona Nic Dhiarmada and Jane Ohlmeyer offer a new narrative of Irish history: open and integrated, situated within its broader global and environmental contexts, and peopled by the voices of those who have often been excluded from it.To do so they draw on cutting-edge research from a uniquely broad range of disciplines - from geology and bio-archaeology to environmental history and literary studies - and a very wide range of sources - from chronicles, letters, and speeches to literature and interviews with contemporary cultural figures. By considering Ireland and the Irish in this fresh and global way, Nic Dhiarmada and Ohlmeyer avoid traditional Anglo- or American-centric approaches to Irish history and shed light onto a range of contemporary issues, including debates on race, identity, migration, empire, and globalisation. This richly illustrated book brings original scholarship to a broad audience in a compelling way, offering a diverse and human-centred narrative of the peoples of Ireland, both those who lived on the island and those who left.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part 1: From the Beginning 1: The beginning: place and people 2: The coming of Christianity: the book and the word 3: The Vikings and their legacy Part 2: The Making of the Irish 4: Of Gaels, Normans, and English 5: Ireland and the medieval world 6: The winds of change Part 3: New Worlds 7: Conquest complete 8: The first diaspora 9: How the world shaped Ireland 10: The limits of empire and beyond 11: Age of revolution 12: The age of the liberator Part 4: From the Famine to the Future 13: The Great Famine and its wake 14: Striking a blow for freedom 15: Independent nation 16: What does it mean to be Irish? Conclusion

About the Author :
Bríona Nic Dhiarmada is the Thomas J and Kathleen O'Donnell Professor Emerita of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. A writer, academic, and filmmaker, Nic Dhiarmada was educated in Trinity College and UCD. She lectured at UCD and worked in television before returning to academia in 2006. She taught at the University of Limerick, the University of Missouri, and held a Senior Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame before joining the fulltime faculty as a tenured endowed professor. Nic Dhiarmada has written numerous screenplays and produced and directed award-winning documentaries including writing and producing multi-award-winning documentary series 1916: The Irish Rebellion narrated by Liam Neeson for RTE, PBS, and BBC. Her companion book to the series won the Foreward Prize for History. She is writer and producer of a four-part series for RTE and international broadcast: From that Small Island: The Story of the Irish. Jane Ohlmeyer is Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin, where she was Trinity's first Vice-President for Global Relations (2011--14). She was a driving force behind the 1641 Depositions Project and the development of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute which she directed (2015--20). She has held appointments and fellowships across the globe, and chaired the Irish Research Council (2015--21). She was the PI for 'Shape-ID', 'Shaping Interdisciplinary Practices in Europe', and in 2023 received an Advanced ERC for VOICES, a project on the lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland. She is the author or editor of numerous articles and twelve books. Ohlmeyer's book Making Ireland: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World, which she gave as the Ford Lectures in Oxford (2021) was published in 2023. In 2023, she was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Humanities.