In the same spring that John Hume's seminal article appeared in the Irish Times (May 1964) advocating for nonviolent means of addressing a growing crisis in Northern Ireland, Wendell Berry published his first book of poetry. Accompanied by stunning illustrations, the book was comprised of a single elegy, “November Twenty Six Nineteen Sixty Three,” which first appeared the previous December in The Nation. At the same time, profound social change was occurring in Ireland, Northern Ireland and America that would redefine the relationships between all three—and between all three and Britain.

In America on October 1, 1962, after the governor of Mississippi defied a Supreme Court order and a riot ensued that required the National Guard to subdue, James Meredith became the first African American to matriculate at the University of Mississippi. Some 250,000 civil rights marchers traveled to Washington the following August, where Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech reverberated through the Lincoln Memorial. In the summer of 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, with the Voting Rights Act signed into law a year later. The impact of these events was enormous, and it was not confined to America.