Twenty-two distinguished international historians - contributors to the 1991 conference marking the bicentenary of the founding of the Societies of United Irishmen in Belfast and Dublin - offer fresh interpretations of the period:

Their subjects include attractive and cosmopolitan figures such as Wolfe Tone, Edmund Burke, John Fitzgibbon, Archbishop Troy, Tom Paine and Lord Edward Fitzgerald; the political clubs and press in France; Ireland's reception of the French Revolution; Scottish radicalism, Dissent, popular loyalism and separatism; Ulster's Defenders, the raising of Yeomanry and role of Freemasonry; the legacy of the United Irish exiles in America; the complex political dynamics which culminated in the 1798 rebellion.