What do these have in common? James Cagney, Eamon de Valera, Pierce Brosnan, Raymond Chandler, the Ku Klux Klan, the Legion of Mary, Judy Garland and Jesse James?
They are just some of the thousands of entries in the new Encyclopaedia of the Irish in America edited by Michael Glazier and published by University of Notre Dame Press. For anyone interested in Irish America it is fascinating to dip into its 988 pages and illustrations.
Some of the Irish connections may appear tenuous. The Ku Klux Klan is there because of its attacks on Catholics, many of whom were, of course, Irish.
To qualify for entry there has to be an Irish ancestor somewhere in the family tree or you have to have settled in the US and be reasonably famous or infamous. Hence Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson, Niall O'Dowd, publisher of the Irish Voice, Frank McCourt and Maureen O'Sullivan, all of whom crossed over from the Ould Sod. Eamon de Valera was born in New York and that may have saved him from the 1916 firing squad.
There are some solid chunks of scholarship and research interspersed between the potted biographies. "The Irish in America" is a 17-page essay on the Irish experience from about 1650 to the present day, with census figures showing how the emigrants put down their roots in the 50 states.
The author, Patrick J. Blessing, is a good example himself of the Irish success story in America. He gets a separate entry where we learn that he was once a labourer in Bord na Mona and a messenger boy in Kimmage before heading for America in 1957. After cycling across the US, he was drafted into the Marine Corps, in which he served twice in Vietnam.
Back in civilian life, he earned a Ph. D in American history, a fellowship to Harvard and became a professor who has also taught in Dublin and Moscow. Not bad for a turf-cutter and messenger boy. You have to wonder what he would be doing now if he had stayed in Ireland.
A pioneering part of this work by Mr Glazier and his 245 contributors are the entries on the Irish connections to each of the 50 states and major cities. There is even an entry for Hawaii, where today you can find Cullens, Gleasons, Toomeys and McInerneys.
Another enlightening section is devoted to the Scots-Irish, whose contribution to the development of the US was enormous but who have tended to be overshadowed in recent times since John F. Kennedy showed that the highest office could be won by a descendant of the "Famine Irish" and of once despised Catholics.
Mr Glazier could not find a Scots-Irish historian in the US to write this section. He was told they "have disappeared".
Lawrence McCaffrey, who is well known in Ireland, has written learnedly on Irish-American Catholicism, portraying blemishes such as racism as well as achievements like building up one of the most powerful and wealthiest institutions in the country in the 1950s. The Catholic Church's decline in America since the second Vatican Council is also described and how "Irish-Americans have turned to history, literature and other aspects of culture to sustain their identity". Mr Glazier, who once ran the Kerry Bookshop in Tralee, spent only 2 1/2 years producing his encyclopaedia. He flatters this correspondent by saying he got the idea from something I wrote in The Irish Times. I wish I could remember.
Mr Glazier says he found existing books on Irish-Americans "repetitious" and they "did not tell us much about the Irish in a personal way". He believed that a new approach to cover the subject state by state and the big cities would give a new picture. He also wanted to "correct misapprehensions about immigration".
One challenge was to find the first "documented Irishman" and with the help of researcher Brian McGinn he unearthed Richard Butler from Clonmel who described landing on what is today North Carolina's Outer Banks in 1584. Christopher Columbus gets a mention as having "Irish connections" through Galway.
Mr Glazier also found that many Irish-American academics "spend the whole time studying Ireland and have not a clue about Irish-America".
He never wants to read a book about Irish-America again but is now working on an encyclopaedia on American Catholic women whose achievements he says have been neglected.
Time for another quiz? What have Gregory Peck, Ben Hogan, Walt Disney, baseball, Goody Glover and George Mitchell got in common? You knew, of course, that "Goody" or Ann Glover was hanged by the Puritans in Boston in 1688 as an Irish witch?
As for baseball, its origins are disputed between Protestant Yankees, who trace it back to rounders on English village greens, and Irish-Americans, one of whom declared that "all outdoor games played with a stick and a ball have their origin in the ancient game of hurling".
President Clinton, who now talks a lot about "the land of my ancestors", does not figure in the encyclopaedia. How come? Mr Glazier seems to have his doubts about the connection. No wonder he wasn't invited to the White House for St Patrick's Day.