'Some of these stories are accurate; all of them are true...' In his "An Irish History of Civilization", Don Akenson, the world's leading scholar of the Irish Dispora, fuses history and fiction into a remarkable narrative of the people and their influence around the globe. "An Irish History of Civilization" is about the Irish at home and abroad, the great and the small, the noble and the depraved, the saints and he sinners, adventures and idealists. As Akenson follows his chosen people on their odyssey around the globe, the lines between history and fiction become irretrievably, beguilingly lost in the mists of time. Volume Two begins with the Great Famine and goes on to show the Irish adapting, improvising and innovating in Ireland and overseas - in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia and South Africa. The book ends by demonstrating the centrality of both Catholic and Protestant Irish culture to the United States.