During the four decades that followed the great famine, over three million people born in Ireland emigrated to the U.S.A. In the seventies and eighties these Irish-Americans and their descendants played a distinct role in Irish politics. The period was a critical era in the history of Ireland. It was marked by the beginnings of Gladstone’s ‘mission to pacify Ireland’ and of the home-rule movement under Butt; by the ‘land war’ of 1879–82, when the tenant farmers, under the leadership of Parnell and Davitt, offered a successful massresistance to the landlords; by the unchallenged ascendancy of Parnell and his party in national politics for the next eight years; and by the transformation of the conditions of the Anglo-Irish conflict through the conversion of Gladstone and the British liberal party to home rule.