Hugh Dorian was born in poverty in rural Donegal in 1834. He survived Ireland's Great Famine, only to squander uncommon opportunities for self-advancement. Having lost his job and clashed with priests and policemen, he moved to the city of Derry but never slipped the shadow of trouble. Three of his children died from disease and his wife fell drunk into the River Foyle and drowned. Dorian declined into alcohol-numbed poverty and died in an overcrowded slum in 1914. A unique document survived the tragedy of Dorian's life. In 1890 he completed a true historical narrative of the social and...

From the time that the blight first came on the potatoes in Ireland in 1845, armed and masked men dubbed Molly Maguires had been raiding the houses of people deemed to be taking advantage of the rural poor. On some occasions, they represented themselves as "Molly's Sons," sent by their mother, to carry out justice; on others, a man attired as a woman, introducing "herself" as Molly Maguire, demanding redress for wrongs inflicted on her children. The raiders might stipulate the maximum price at which provisions were to be sold, warn against the eviction of tenants, or demand that an evicted...