Dictionary of Irish Biography wins major award!

The massive, comprehensive Dictionary of Irish Biography was awarded the 2009 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) for Best Multivolume Reference work in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Congratulations to the Royal Irish Academy, the editors, and all involved here at the Press.

Americans and Big Government

Via Marsall Poe’s New Books in History

Americans don’t like “big government” right? Not exactly. In the Early Republic (1789 to the 1820s) folks were quite keen on building up the (you guessed it) republic. As in res publica, the “things held in common.” The “founding fathers”–all “Classical Republicans”–designed a form of government that, though “checked and balanced,” gave the federal government significant powers. And throughout the 19th-century Americans asked the federal government to use those powers to do all kinds of things, many of them profoundly self-interested.