"Ireland Since 1939" is a history of Ireland, north and south of the border, since the outbreak of the Second World War, by one of the most distinguished Irish historians at work today. Synthesizing primary and secondary sources, Henry Patterson offers a compelling narrative of contemporary Ireland as a place perhaps uniquely poised between the divisiveness of deep-seated conflict and the modernizing but perhaps no less divisive pull of ever-greater material prosperity. Although the two states of Ireland have strikingly divergent histories, Patterson shows more clearly than any previous historian how interdependent those histories and the mirroring ideologies that have fuelled them have been.