Collens, Thomas Wharton (23 June 1812–03 November 1879), Creole jurist and writer, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of John Wharton Collens and Marie Louise de Tabiteau. Collens’s father was descended from an English officer who had settled in Louisiana in the eighteenth century. His mother was a member of one of the city’s French-speaking, Creole families. Raised in a bilingual, Catholic household of modest means, Collens overcame a limited education during an apprenticeship in the print shop to which he was sent as a youth. By the age of twenty-one he had advanced to the position of associate editor of the ...
Article
Collens, Thomas Wharton (1812-1879), Creole jurist and writer
Caryn Cossé Bell
Article
Hughes, Robert William (6 or 16 June 1821–10 December 1901), writer and judge
Elizabeth Brand Monroe
Hughes, Robert William (6 or 16 June 1821–10 December 1901), writer and judge, was born in Powhatan County, Virginia, the son of Jesse Hughes, a farmer, and Elizabeth Woodson Morton. In 1822 Hughes’s parents died and the infant was taken in and reared by General Edward C. Carrington and his wife. At the age of twelve Hughes was apprenticed to a carpenter in New Jersey but later attended the Caldwell Institute in Greensboro, North Carolina, and in the early 1840s taught school in Hillsboro (now Hillsborough), North Carolina. In the mid-1840s he read law in Fincastle, Virginia, and began his law practice in Richmond in 1846. In 1850 he married Eliza M. Johnston, daughter of Charles C. Johnston, a U.S. congressman; the couple had two children....
Article
Pryor, Roger Atkinson (1828-1919), journalist, Confederate soldier and jurist
Daniel E. Sutherland
Pryor, Roger Atkinson (19 July 1828–14 March 1919), journalist, Confederate soldier and jurist, was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, the son of Theodorick Bland Pryor, a lawyer, and Lucy Eppes Atkinson. His mother died before Pryor was two years old, so he was raised by his father, who had become a Presbyterian minister. Pryor attended the Classical Academy in Petersburg before entering Hampden-Sidney College in 1843, where he graduated as class valedictorian in 1845. He went on to study law at the University of Virginia for two years, taking his degree in 1847....
Article
Rodell, Fred (1907-1980), legal educator and journalist
Michael H. Hoffheimer
Rodell, Fred (01 March 1907–04 June 1980), legal educator and journalist, was born Alfred M. Rodelheim, Jr., in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Alfred M. Rodelheim, an engineer, and Florence Wolf Fleisher. Rodell’s parents, members of prominent assimilated Jewish families, divorced when he was four, and he and his younger brother John went with his mother to live on the estate of his uncle, Howard Loeb, president of Tradesmen’s National Bank. Rodell avoided contact with his father after he turned sixteen and changed his name to Fred Rodell in 1928. Attracted to journalism at an early age, Rodell edited his high school student newspaper and college yearbook. He entered Haverford College at the age of fifteen, received his B.A. in 1926 with high honors, and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa. During the winter of 1926–1927 he studied with Harold Laski at the University of London. He edited for the Century Publishing Company and wrote for ...