Tim Egan on THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became An American Hero.

Host Per Fagereng speaks with National Book Award-winning author Timothy Egan about his new book, THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became An American Hero, the epic story of one of the most fascinating Irishmen in 19th-century America. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America. Meagher’s rebirth in America included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade from New York in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War: Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. His death has long been a mystery to which Egan brings haunting, colorful new evidence.