John Gordon Thomson, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
Just 30 years after the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, history was repeating itself. Faced with more failing crops, landlords in Ireland again began evicting the tenant farmers who could no longer earn their keep. The issue had never really gone away: The previous famine had revealed just how few farmers actually owned land, and citizens had been fighting for tenants’ rights since the 1850s. But the latest agricultural crisis caused tension to boil over.
In 1879, farmers launched the Land War, a widespread resistance to unfair rent prices and evictions. With it came the establishment of the Land League, an organization seeking to overhaul Ireland’s feudal system of land ownership.