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David Sim’s A Union Forever takes a unique approach to history: choosing to detail a failure rather than a success. He writes that examining both the methods and repercussions of Irish and Irish-American nationalist attempts to foster a relationship with the United States that would ideally help gain Irish sovereignty is valuable because this “[illustrates] the openness of U.S. foreign policy to the influence of nonstate actors,…[highlight] a fundamental ambivalence about the prospect of other peoples emulating the U.S. model of republican revolution…[and] details the process by which British and American statesmen built stronger transatlantic ties through the marginalization of revolutionary Irish nationalism.” (2) This outline of Sim’s major points is refreshingly straightforward, leaving his reader little room to misinterpret his ideas. It is a major strength of the book.
The rest of Sim’s introduction however, shows weak points. His historiography, while cleverly divided into three subsections that organize the material quite well, presents a great deal of information that goes uncited. Page 4-5 of the introduction has two full paragraphs of concrete statements about American thoughts on Ireland, without a single work cited. This might be nit-picking, but I tend to question the validity and extensiveness of an historian’s research when this occurs.
Despite that minor problem, I did enjoy the body of the book. Like sbremer, I found chapter four particularly interesting, and probably for the same reason – he relates this chapter in his blog post to the idea of Ireland’s ultimate failure to make anything happen. As noted above, this idea of examining a failure is not the norm in history because history tends to remember the victors. Despite this, Sim does a good job of noting what the Irish nationalists were successfully able to do, even if their strides forward ultimately hurt their cause. He notes at the end of the chapter that in calling attention to British arrests of American citizens, nationalists were able to “gain great leverage with U.S. public opinion” and were instrumental in the U.S.’s improvement in terms of protecting American citizens abroad, even though this did inadvertently cause peaceful negotiations between the Americans and British.
I agree with 20perez16 that this chapter also had the strongest use of primary sources. Sim notes in the introduction that the “elevated status” of certain notable figures (his in this book are Daniel O’Connell and Charles Steward Parnell) can come at the cost of glossing over the agency and activity of the average Irish and Irish-American nationalists. (10) This makes it sound like the ensuing chapters will come from a bottom-up perspective, but only chapter four seems to successfully do this by mixing political sources with the letters and accounts of incarcerated Irish-Americans such as William Nagle and John Warren. (112-13) This is not necessarily a failing on Sim’s part, as the book is quite definitely a political history for the most part. However, it did make chapter four the strongest section in the book in my opinion.