Introduction to Irish OR American history books

Fad

Hi!

Firstly, apologies if this kinda question has been dealt with before, feel free to lock the topic.

Basically, there's two countries I'd like to know a bit more about, Ireland and America!

Basically, I only did history up until the Junior Cert and I've come to the point where I'm 2/3s the way through a science degree and I dont know very much about other things, so I want to rectify this.

I'm interested in reading a bit more about Irish history. Like I vaguely remember the Good Friday agreement being signed, but I dont really know very much about it, so I'd like to know more about stuff like the civil war (And what caused it), and the IRA and then the various iterations of the IRA and so on.

Also American history, I dont really know what sort of years I'm looking at, the civil war seems interesting. Mainly because I'd like to understand the whole political system over there a bit better and while I have a vague idea what a confederate is, I'd like to understand the whole thing better.

Does anyone have any recommendations for books on either of these? Preferably not textbooks of any form, I'm reading enough of those at the moment...

convert

You could try Tom Bartlett's Concise History of Ireland. It's informative without being overly detailed. It'd give you a broad introduction to pretty much all the important points of Irish history.