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Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, by Charles Townshend. Chicago, Illinois: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. $22.00. Pp. 480.
On April 24, 1916 - Easter Monday - a rebellion was launched on the streets of Dublin with the aim of establishing a republic in Ireland and breaking away from the British Empire. After a week of fighting, the rebellion was crushed. The Easter Rising was a dramatic and pivotal moment in Irish and indeed Imperial history. As a consequence it has attracted a great deal of interest by historians ever since.
The latest book to deal with the subject has a distinct advantage over those written in the last 40 years in that it has access to recently released eye-witness material. Not since Max Caulfield's magisterial The Easter Rebellion (1963) has the Rising been studied with such attention to the primary sources.
Appreciating the importance of obtaining accounts of participants in Ireland's struggle for independence, a Bureau of Military History was established in January 1947, to compile testimony and materials. Over the following ten years 1,773 witness statements were gathered: these were army interviews with those who had been politically active from 1913 to 1923.
Townshend's is the first narrative history of the Easter Rising to make use of this archive and as a result it has been hailed as "the definitive account" by The Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. But the book actually serves as a reminder that no matter how rich the primary source material, for better or worse, the judgment of the historian always affects how the material is sifted.
In this case I feel that Townshend's biases...