BIO: Douglas HYDE (1860-1949), was an academic and cultural revivalist. The son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, HYDE was brought up first in Co. Sligo and then, from 1867, at Frenchpark, Co. Roscommon, both areas rich in antiquities and where some spoken Irish survived. He entered Trinity College in 1880, switching from an initial course of divinity to law. "The Necessity of De-anglicizing the Irish People"(1892) his inaugural lecture as president of the National Literary Society, called for action to arrest the decay of Irish, denounced the imitation of English manners, but also recommended Anglo-Irish literature as superior to imported mass-circulation works. Though not the founder of the Gaelic League, HYDE became its first president in 1893. He was professor of Irish at University College, Dublin, 1909-32, a member of the Irish Free State Senate from 1925, and first president of Ireland 1938-45. HYDE published extensively, drawing both on oral tradition and on manuscript sources. His most important collections included "Love Songs of Connacht" (1893) and "The Religious Songs of Connacht" (1906). He collaborated with poet William Butler YEATS and Lady Augusta GREGORY (author born Augusta PERSSE, from a Galway landowning family, husband of Sir William GREGORY) on a number of theatrical productions, commencing with Casadh an tSugain ("The Twisting of the Rope") in 1901, the first Irish language play performed in a theatre, and published a highly successful "Literary History of Ireland" in 1899. HYDE's public insistence that the Gaelic League should avoid politics, leading eventually to his resignation as president in 1915, has encouraged the image of an unworldly and apolitical idealist. Such a portrayal hardly does justice to the organizational and strategic capacity displayed in Hyde's promotion of the league, or to the skills as a public performer revealed in his highly successful fund-raising visit to America during 1905. HYDE's own political sympathies were nationalist, and he was to comment subsequently that he had sought to resist the politicization of the league only because he did not foresee the triumph of Sinn Fein. -- Excerpts, "The Oxford Companion to Irish History," ed. S. J. Connolly (2002). See also "J. E. & G. W. Dunleavy, "Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland" (1991).