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In April 1916, the front pages of America’s newspapers were dominated by headlines about the war on Europe’s western front, where the German and French armies were battling at Verdun, and by reports of German American opposition to President Wilson’s re-election campaign. Then, on Tuesday morning, the 25th, came news of the capture of a German ship that had tried to land arms on Ireland’s west coast, and the arrest of Sir Roger Casement, a retired diplomat. “Daring Invasion of Ireland by Germans Fails,” screamed the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. Partisan passions about World War I were running high in the United States, and pro-British papers like The New York Times were quick to circulate the “official” announcement calling Casement “mentally unbalanced,” and the Irish news nothing more than a “madcap adventure.”
In surveying the period from the Famine in 1848 to the triumph of Sinn Fein in the 1918 general election, Joe Lee argues that Ireland became one of the most modern and advanced political cultures in the world during that time. Lee contends that the Famine death-rate, however terrible, was not unprecedented. What was different was the post-Famine response to the catastrophy. The sharply increased rate of emigration left behind a population of tenent farmers engaged in market orientated agriculture and determined to protect and improve their position. It was this group that used the British political system so skillfully, a process elaborated and refined in the Land League and Home Rule movements under Parnell. The Parnell era left a lasting legacy of modern political engagement and organisation which was carried on in essentials by the later Home Rule party and by Sinn Fein, and - beyond the terminal date of the book - would make its mark on the politics of independent Ireland.