In the last decade there has been a plethora of books about Irish soldiers in the First World War, yet the fact that recruitment to the British forces continued into the interwar period and the Second World War has received comparatively little attention. Steven O'Connor's work addresses this gap by providing a much-needed assessment of officer recruitment to the British military after Irish independence. Based on archival research, oral testimony and a database of 1,000 officers it examines the reasons why young Irish people took the king's commission. It explores their subsequent experiences and identity in the forces, and places them within the wider context of Commonwealth recruitment to the British forces. Drawing on evidence from police reports, debates in town councils and local newspapers this volume also offers the first comprehensive account of reactions in independent Ireland to British recruitment and the shared military past.

This book showcases new historical research on foreign soldiers, including an overview of the early modern period and numerous case studies which cover the last 175 years and stretch over 5 continents. The last two decades have seen the term 'foreign fighter' enter our everyday vocabulary. The insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Syrian Civil War and the rise and fall of the Islamic State group have sparked public interest in the phenomenon of people choosing to leave their own country and fight in a foreign conflict. Foreign fighters, their origins, motives, activities and potential danger to their home countries have become subjects of debate, attracting contributions from politicians, military personnel, the media, political scientists, legal scholars but to a much lesser extent from historians. The ten essayss in this volume showcase new historical research on foreign military labour. The aim of the volume is to better understand the experiences and challenges faced by both the foreigners and the host country, particularly its armed forces, and to highlight the significance of these trends to the contemporary debate on foreign fighters. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal European Review of History.

Irish Officers in the British forces, 1922-45 looks at the reasons why young Irish people took the king's commission, including the family tradition, the school influence and the employment motive. It explores their subsequent experiences in the forces and the responses in independent Ireland to the continuation of this British military connection.

"Dazzling. . . The most revolutionary reimagining of Jefferson's life ever." -Ron Charles, Washington Post Winner of the Crook's Corner Book Prize Longlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A debut novel about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, in whose story the conflict between the American ideal of equality and the realities of slavery and racism played out in the most tragic of terms. Novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, James McBride's The Good Lord Bird and Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks are a part of a long tradition of American fiction that plumbs the moral and human costs of history in ways that nonfiction simply can't. Now Stephen O'Connor joins this company with a profoundly original exploration of the many ways that the institution of slavery warped the human soul, as seen through the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. O'Connor's protagonists are rendered via scrupulously researched scenes of their lives in Paris and at Monticello that alternate with a harrowing memoir written by Hemings after Jefferson's death, as well as with dreamlike sequences in which Jefferson watches a movie about his life, Hemings fabricates an "invention" that becomes the whole world, and they run into each other "after an unimaginable length of time" on the New York City subway. O'Connor is unsparing in his rendition of the hypocrisy of the Founding Father and slaveholder who wrote "all men are created equal," while enabling Hemings to tell her story in a way history has not allowed her to. His important and beautifully written novel is a deep moral reckoning, a story about the search for justice, freedom and an ideal world-and about the survival of hope even in the midst of catastrophe.

An epic, adventurous tale of a family of genetically enhanced human beings, with one member deciding on becoming a vigilante in order to combat the rising level of crime in Brisbane City. Steven Lockyer embarks on starting a vigilante crusade with the backing of his aunt Stefani Lockyer. He assumes the identity of Omega Magnus. Along the way he deals with mercenaries, a secret organisation, a benefactor and a outrageous political cult. Along the way, he deals with keeping his family together, and he eventually and unexpectedly finds love. The first Volume in this epic series of Omega Magnus and his family, and their adventures and perils in an action-adventure series.

STEPHEN O'CONNOR IS ONE OF TODAY'S MOST GIFTED AND ORIGINAL WRITERS. In "Here Comes Another Lesson, "O'Connor, whose stories have appeared in "The New Yorker, Conjunctions, "and many other places, fearlessly depicts a world that no longer quite makes sense. Ranging from the wildly inventive to the vividly realistic, these brilliant stories offer tender portraits of idealists who cannot live according to their own ideals and of lovers baffled by the realities of love.
The story lines are unforgettable: A son is followed home from work by his dead father. God instructs a professor of atheism to disseminate updated Commandments. The Minotaur is awakened to his own humanity by the computer-game-playing "new girl" who has been brought to him for supper. A recently returned veteran longs for the utterly ordinary life he led as a husband and father before being sent to Iraq. An ornithologist, forewarned by a cormorant of the exact minute of his death, struggles to remain alert to beauty and joy.
As playful as it is lyrical, "Here Comes Another Lesson "celebrates human hopefulness and laments a sane and gentle world that cannot exist.

Putting a human face on dire statistics about inner-city schools, Stephen O'Connor describes how his junior high school students--struggling to make sense of lives touched by violence, poverty, and broken families--discovered their own voices by writing and performing two plays.

In mid-nineteenth-century New York, vagrant youth, both orphans and runaways, filled the streets. For years the city had been sweeping these children into prisons or almshouses, but in 1853 the young minister Charles Loring Brace proposed a radical solution to the problem by creating the Children's Aid Society, an organization that fought to provide homeless children with shelter, education, and, for many, a new family in the country. Combining a biography of Brace with firsthand accounts of orphans, Stephen O'Connor here tells of the orphan trains that, between 1854 and 1929, spirited away some 250,000 destitute children to rural homes in every one of the forty-eight contiguous states.
A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, Orphans Trains remains the definitive work on this little-known episode in American history.