Living among the poor rural people in a crucial period of Irish history, he left in this book a valuable social document and a view of momentous events as seen by the common people.The crucial events in modern Irish history--the Great Famine, the 48 Rebellion, movements for Tenants' Rights and Home Rule, the Easter Rising and the War of Independence--are here related, not with the detached precision of the historian, but as they were experienced by the rural poor. In MyStory, first published in 1915, well-known writer and priest Peter O'Leary recorded his observations of late 19th-century Ireland: families sustained by tiny plots of land, confrontations with landlords, and famines that drove people to workhouses. Translator Cyril O Ceirin has rendered O'Leary's Irish in the colorful, colloquial English of a well-educated Munster clergyman."