By: Braxton Howard, 2023 Award Winner of the Donna M. Neiman Award, Senior History Major

This is a public presentation of a paper originally written for HIST 4805: Revolutions in World History, taught by Dr. Michael Brooks. Although shortened to the essentials, this post aims to outline the ways that the relatively short Easter Rising of 1916 could bring to light divides that had grown among the Irish people, which would bring over a century of contention exhibited not only through a war for independence and the Troubles, but also equally contentious works of history. These divisions – an intertwined mixture of views on British rule and religious belief – would come to a boiling point as frustrations with the British grew in reaction to representation issues, the Irish Famine in the 1840s, and, at the time of the Rising, World War I drafts. Religion had long been a point of conflict among the Irish, with British attempts to convert them to Protestantism, often by force, occurring regularly and finding the most success in Northern Ireland.