The Irish Revolution

The lecturer is excellent, and the material is terribly interesting, but it appears as though the audience was doing a river dance in the background and distracted from the lecture.

Every history podcast should be this good. Plus it is commercial free.

Modern history of a nation proud now and free, so long relegated to virtual subhuman status by its British overlords, known to some, but needing to be known by all. Professor Michael Laffan's 10 lecture series grants no sainthood to any, painting the verbal picture on both sides of "it is as it was". Proud, relentless, unbending in its desire to be free of 700+ years of British domination, Irish patriots rose generation after generation to confront their tormentors, often spilling the blood of their own, as seen in the final lecture: The Irish Civil War. Professor Laffan's concise presentation is reflective of his almost 40 years teaching this history module at the University of Dublin. As a dramatic accompaniment to this series, I highly recommend RTÉ's Conspiracy Podcast - Trials Under The Union, available from iTunes also. This four part dramatized series presents some of the most significant trials of Irish patriots between the Act of Union in 1801 and Irish Independence in 1922. The radio series features the trials of Robert Emmet, Daniel O'Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell and Roget Casement, as well as legal and social commentary by Irish legal scholars and historians. The powerful and passionate witness statements of the accused ring as true today as the day their echoes began their long march through time.

This is the first lecture series I've listened to via podcast, and I have to say it was a good experience. I was a bit dissappointed that large chunks of the curriculum seemed to be handled in seminars, which were not recorded for this podcast. Nevertheless, I felt this was a useful treatment of topics like The Home Rule Party, The Easter Rising, The Anglo-Irish War, and The Irish Civil War. My biggest complaint would be that Professor Laffan has the annoying habit so common to establishment historians of pretending to be "objective", leaving to the student the task of determining where the professor's biases actually lie. This is particularly confusing for students who did not grow up in Ireland or Britain and might therefore be unfamiliar with the ideological faultlines concerned. For my part, I found Laffan's treatment of the events to be oddly pro-Britain, to the point where I kept having to remind myself that I was, in fact, listening to an Irish professor lecturing in Ireland. Admittedly, this may be a product of my own unfamiliarity with the relevant orthodoxies, having grown up in the United States. However, the level of detail and meticulous structure of the course speaks of experience and goes a long way to make up for the flaws. I find myself inclined to recommend this course for those who, like me, know embarassingly little about the events in Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century and wish to know more. Surely, it is a fine starting point.