A brilliant writer, outstanding orator, and charismatic politician, Thomas D'Arcy McGee is best known for his prominent role in Irish-Canadian politics, his inspirational speeches in support of Canadian Confederation, and his assassination by an Irish revolutionary who accused him of betraying his earlier Irish nationalist principles. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the first volume in a two-part biography, explores the development of those principles in Ireland and the United States. David Wilson follows McGee from Wexford, Ireland across the Atlantic to Boston, where at nineteen he became the editor of America's leading Irish newspaper, and traces his subsequent involvement with the Young Ireland movement, his reactions to the Famine, and his role in the Rising of 1848. Wilson goes on to examine McGee's experiences as a political refugee in the United States, where his increasing disillusionment with revolutionary Irish nationalism and his opposition to American nativism propelled him towards conservative Catholicism and sent him on a trajectory that ultimately led to Canada - his experiences are the subject of volume 2, Thomas D'Arcy McGee: The Extreme Moderate, 1857-1868.

David A. Wilson is a professor in the Celtic Studies Program and the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He is the author and editor of several books including Ireland, a Bicycle, and a Tin Whistle and United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic.

David A. Wilson's profile page

"...both elegant and mature, a biographical tour de force." Victor Rabinovitch, Literary Review of Canada

"...a brilliant piece of scholarship: exhaustively researched, scrupulously fair, thoroughly documented." Roger Hall, Globe & Mail