The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration.

It is a rare privilege for a historian to discover documents in which a remote and distant rural community leaves "an articulate record of its thoughts in its own words" (7). Scally found such a set of documents in the Quit Rent Office Papers in the Irish National Archives and the estate papers at Strokestown House, County Roscommon. These materials describe a fourteen-year period during which the residents of Ballykilcline, Co. Roscommon, emerge from "hidden Ireland" to stage a well-recorded rent strike against the Crown and, in the process, provide a "tiny window" into the "dynamics of the townland and its behavior" (81).(1) Scally widened this window considerably, climbed …