Speaking with the Dictionary of Irish Biography Blogger

Meet Bill, author and originator of the Dictionary of Irish Biography Blogspot. His mission statement: The new Dictionary of Irish Biography from the Royal Irish Academy and Cambridge UP. 9 volumes, 10,000 pages, 10 million words, 9700 lives. A mammoth account of Irish lives from the earliest times to 2002. I’m reading it from beginning to end.

The Dictionary of Irish Biography – more affectionately, DIB – is the most comprehensive and authoritative biographical reference work on Ireland. From James Ussher to James Joyce, St. Patrick to Patrick Pearse, St. Brigit to Maud Gonne MacBride, Maria Edgeworth to Elizabeth Bowen, Edward Carson to Bobby Sands, this indispensable resource outlines the careers at home and overseas of prominent men and women born in Ireland, north and south, and the noteworthy Irish careers of those born outside Ireland.

I had the chance to ask Bill a few questions about this adventure that he’s embarked on. Read on to learn about his motivations, expectations, and revelations.

Beatles-Mania in Pennsylvania

In the half-century since their founding, the lives and lyrics of The Beatles have won the hearts of an international fandom spanning generations… and captured the interest of two Penn State professors. Catch a clip of Cambridge Companion to the Beatles Editor Ken Womack and Contributor Jerry Zolten being interviewed on WPSU and check out an excerpt of the book.

Hilary Earl on New Books in History

Marshall Poe’s latest podcast on New Books in History features historian Hilary Earl and The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958. In the first historical examination of the arrest, prosecution, and punishment of the leaders of the SS-Einsatzgruppen, Earl takes on one of the most important and insufficiently studied trials of the Holocaust. Posing hard-hitting questions on the nature of mass murder, Earl’s unique interdisciplinary approach synthesizes a range of historical, social, scientific, and legal resources to provide new insight into the individual motivations of those who sought to carry out the Final Solution.

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.

“Disturbances” reviewed in the THE

In a great Times Higher Education piece, professor of psychology David Smail reviews Disturbances of the Mind by Douwe Draaisma.

In this cleverly constructed book, several of the puzzles of present-day neurology are considered alongside accounts of the lives and times of those with whom they are eponymously associated. Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and Korsakoff’s, Tourette’s and Asperger’s syndromes feature among the better-known instances, but lesser-known syndromes such as the those of Clerambault and Capgras (perhaps more psychiatric than neurological) are also considered. Each receives a chapter to itself.

The author’s particular skill is in making his subject matter interesting at several levels and to different groups of readers. His accounts of the successes and sorrows of those who are seen (not always accurately, as he points out) as the discoverers of these well-known diseases are historically vivid without resorting to hagiography; and the story of the fortunes of their brain-children as they negotiate the fluctuations of medical and social fashion since their conception is absorbing.