Anglican Britain had de facto control over Catholic Ireland long before the two united under the British Crown. Theirs was a checkered history: Britain feared the corrupting influence of its Catholic neighbor, as did pro-Britain Protestants in Ireland, and centuries of a low-grade civil war battle came to a head during the Easter Uprising of 1916, marking the start of the latest and bloodiest phase of the conflict.

On this day, April 10, in 1998, a “Good Friday agreement” for peace officially ended the “Troubles.” The pact gave Northern Ireland, which declared its independence from the UK in the 1920s, a chance to govern its own affairs, while ending the bombings and attacks on British targets by the Irish Republican Army.

The troubles in Northern Ireland paralleled the struggles of blacks in the Civil Rights movement. Both movements were oppressed by the ruling party: four years after a protest in Selma was brutally broken up by the police, a protest march in Northern Ireland was violently dispersed by the British Army. But unlike its counterparts in America, the Irish independence groups responded to violence in kind.