Adams, Cyrus Cornelius (07 January 1849–04 May 1928), geographer and editor, was born in Naperville, Illinois, the son of Cyrus Adams and Cornelia Stevens, farmers. He was raised by his aunt and uncle in Bloomington, Minnesota, and attended the nascent University of Minnesota for a year, continuing at the first University of Chicago. He became a reporter for the Chicago ...
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Adams, Cyrus Cornelius (07 January 1849–04 May 1928), geographer and editor
Michael P. Conzen
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Adams, Harriet Chalmers (22 October 1875–17 July 1937)
Tamar Y. Rothenberg
Adams, Harriet Chalmers (22 October 1875–17 July 1937), explorer, lecturer, and writer, was born Harriet Chalmers in Stockton, California. Her father, Alexander Chalmers, Canadian via Scotland, came to California in 1864 to try his luck mining; he later ran a dry goods store with his brother before becoming a mine superintendent and part-owner. Her mother, Frances Wilkins, had grown up in the Sierra Nevada foothills. From the age of eleven Harriet and her sister Anna had private tutors. Her mother encouraged Harriet’s love of reading, while travels with her father developed her interest in the natural world as well as the Native American and Spanish-speaking cultures in the region. At thirteen Harriet and her father spent more than six months meandering the length of the Sierras from Oregon to Mexico, cementing her lifelong love of adventure. As a young woman Harriet continued her indoor and outdoor studies and had an active social life. She was fluent in Spanish and spoke Portuguese, French, Italian, and German as well....
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Adams, Harriet Chalmers (22 October 1875–17 July 1937)
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Harriet Chalmers Adams. Harriet Chalmers Adams. Harriet Chalmers Adams, 1908. Glass negative. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-DIG-npcc-19900).
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Ahern, Mary Eileen (1860-1938), librarian and editor
Barbara B. Brand
Ahern, Mary Eileen (01 October 1860–22 May 1938), librarian and editor, was born on a farm southwest of Indianapolis, Indiana, to William Ahern, a farmer, and Mary O’Neill, both Irish immigrants. In 1870 the family left the farm for Spencer, Indiana, where Mary Eileen graduated from high school in 1878. Following her graduation from Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana, in 1881, she worked as a teacher in the public schools of Bloomfield, Spencer, and Peru, Indiana, for eight years....
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Allen, Young John William (1836-1907), missionary, educator, and journalist in China
Adrian A. Bennett
Allen, Young John William (03 January 1836–30 May 1907), missionary, educator, and journalist in China, was born in Burke County, Georgia, the son of Andrew Young John Allen and Jane Wooten. Because of the early death of both parents, Allen was raised by an aunt and uncle, Wiley and Nancy (Wooten) Hutchins, who lived in Meriwether County, Georgia. He received a sizable inheritance from his father, which financed his education at several small private schools near his home in Starrsville, Georgia, including the Baptist-run Brownwood Institute in LaGrange, Georgia, and the Morgan H. Looney schools in Palmetto, Georgia. His inheritance also allowed him to collect a personal library, which made him the envy of his classmates as early as 1850, when he was only fourteen years old. He began college work at Emory and Henry College in Virginia in 1853 but transferred to Emory College in Oxford, Georgia, in the spring of 1854. At Emory, Allen acquired the secular learning of the European tradition as well as knowledge of Christianity. His extracurricular activities included membership in a debating society and religious study groups, both of which prepared him for his subsequent careers in China....
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Anneke, Mathilde Franziska Giesler (1817-1884), suffragist, author, and educator
Barbara L. Ciccarelli
Anneke, Mathilde Franziska Giesler (03 April 1817–25 November 1884), suffragist, author, and educator, was born in Lerchenhausen, Westphalia, Germany, the daughter of Karl Giesler, a Catholic landlord and mine owner, and Elisabeth Hülswitt. She grew up comfortably and was well educated, more through learned company than tutors and schools. In fact, as a teacher in later years she would read “Fridjhoff’s saga to her pupils and recite from memory the translation she had read when eleven years old,” given to her by a prince (Heinzen, p. 3)....
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Ascoli, Max (1898-1978), political philosopher, editor, and publisher
Martin K. Doudna
Ascoli, Max (25 June 1898–01 January 1978), political philosopher, editor, and publisher, was born in Ferrara, Italy, the son of Enrico Ascoli, a coal merchant, and Adriana Finzi. Despite serious problems with his eyesight, which were to plague him much of his life, Ascoli earned his LL.D. at the University of Ferrara in 1920 and his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Rome in 1928. His first book, a study of the radical French thinker and writer Georges Sorel, appeared in 1921. An opponent of fascism from its beginnings, Ascoli wrote articles for ...
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Auslander, Joseph (11 October 1897–22 June 1965), poet, editor, and translator
Richard Boudreau
Auslander, Joseph (11 October 1897–22 June 1965), poet, editor, and translator, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Louis Auslander and Martha Asyueck. He attended Columbia University from 1914 to 1915, then transferred to Harvard, receiving his B.A. in 1917. In 1919 he became an instructor in English at Harvard. He pursued graduate studies there until 1924, with the interruption of one year (1921–1922) at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he went on a Parker Traveling Fellowship. His poetry began to appear in national magazines in 1919, and his first volume, ...
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Bangs, John Kendrick (1862-1922), humorist, editor, and lecturer
Richard Bleiler
Bangs, John Kendrick (27 May 1862–21 January 1922), humorist, editor, and lecturer, was born in Yonkers, New York, the son of Francis Nehemiah Bangs, a lawyer, and Frances Amelia Bull, and the grandson of Nathan Bangs, a Methodist clergyman. His ancestors were domineering and ferocious personalities whose achievements overshadowed Bangs’s career, and his perennial reluctance to take either religion or law seriously can be seen as a mild rebellion....
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Barnard, Henry (1811-1900), educator and editor
Edith Nye MacMullen
Barnard, Henry (24 January 1811–05 July 1900), educator and editor, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Chauncey Barnard, a sea captain and farmer, and Betsey Andrews. Barnard spent his formative years in Connecticut and graduated from Yale in 1830. Immediately after college he taught school in Pennsylvania for a year and loathed it. He then read law and was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 1834; however, he never practiced. During the winter of 1832–1833 he spent three months in Washington, D.C., where he met many of the leading political figures of the day, and then traveled in the South. Still lacking direction, he embarked on a grand tour of Europe in March 1835; the impetus for the trip was his selection as one of the Connecticut delegates to the London international peace congress. While in England he was introduced to a number of the foremost Whig intellectuals, politicians, and reformers; at the time he seemed to be primarily interested in the cause of prison reform. After touring England he spent six months on the Continent before returning home to attend his ailing father....
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Bennett, Jr., Lerone (17 October 1928–14 February 2018), historian, scholar, journalist, magazine editor, and author
Margena A. Christian
Bennett, Jr., Lerone (17 October 1928–14 February 2018), historian, scholar, journalist, magazine editor, and author, was born Lerone Bennett, Jr. in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His father, Lerone Bennett, Sr., was a chauffeur, and his mother, Alma Reed, was a cook. After his parents divorced when he was young, he and his mother later moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where he grew up....
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Bibb, Henry Walton (1815-1854), author, editor, and antislavery lecturer
Gregory S. Jackson
Bibb, Henry Walton (10 May 1815–1854), author, editor, and antislavery lecturer, was born into slavery on the plantation of David White of Shelby County, Kentucky, the son of James Bibb, a slaveholding planter and state senator, and Mildred Jackson. White began hiring Bibb out as a laborer on several neighboring plantations before the age of ten. The constant change in living situations throughout his childhood, combined with the inhumane treatment he often received at the hands of strangers, set a pattern for life that he would later refer to in his autobiography as “my manner of living on the road.” Bibb was sold more than six times between 1832 and 1840 and was forced to relocate to at least seven states throughout the South; later, as a free man, his campaign for abolition took him throughout eastern Canada and the northern United States. But such early instability also made the young Bibb both self-sufficient and resourceful, two characteristics that were useful against the day-to-day assault of slavery: “The only weapon of self defense that I could use successfully,” he wrote, “was that of deception.”...
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Bibb, Henry Walton (1815-1854)
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Henry Walton Bibb. Lithograph on paper, 1847, by Unidentified Artist. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
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Bleyer, Willard Grosvenor (1873-1935), journalism educator
James L. Baughman
Bleyer, Willard Grosvenor (27 August 1873–31 October 1935), journalism educator, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Albert J. Bleyer, a newspaperman, and Elizabeth Groshans. Six of Albert’s brothers also worked for newspapers. While an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin (1892–1896), Bleyer edited the student newspaper, the ...
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Booth, Mary Louise (1831-1889), magazine editor and translator
Maurine H. Beasley
Booth, Mary Louise (19 April 1831–05 March 1889), magazine editor and translator, was born in Millville (later Yaphank), Long Island, New York, the oldest child of William Chatfield Booth, a schoolteacher, and Nancy Monsell. Booth attended local schools at Yaphank and at Williamsburgh, which became part of Brooklyn, where the family moved in 1844 when her father became principal of a public school. Mainly, however, she was self-taught, reading the entire Bible at age five and Racine in the original French at seven. Although her father thought teaching the only suitable career for a woman, and she taught in his school briefly (about 1845–1846), she aspired to a literary career....
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Bostwick, Arthur Elmore (1860-1942), editor and librarian
John Mark Tucker
Bostwick, Arthur Elmore (08 March 1860–13 February 1942), editor and librarian, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the son of David Elmore Bostwick, a physician, and Adelaide McKinley. Bostwick took advantage of the cultural assets in his hometown, reading periodicals from a neighbor’s private library, studying romance and classical languages, participating in music ensembles, and attending the Episcopal church where his mother was organist. His innate intellectual abilities were thus stimulated, laying the foundation for an active life of the mind. He attended Yale College, won the first Silliman Fellowship in physical science, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and earned a B.A. in 1881 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1883. Aspiring to a college professorship, he declined an appointment as a Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in favor of a temporary position at Yale but, when a permanent post was not forthcoming, he moved to Montclair, New Jersey, where he taught high school from 1884 to 1886. In 1885 Bostwick married Lucy Sawyer, with whom he had three children....
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Bowers, Claude Gernade (1878-1958), journalist, diplomat, and historian
Peter J. Sehlinger
Bowers, Claude Gernade (20 November 1878–21 January 1958), journalist, diplomat, and historian, was born in Westfield, Indiana, the son of Lewis Bowers, a storekeeper, and Juliet Tipton, a milliner and dressmaker. Reared in rural communities in central Indiana, Claude moved to Indianapolis with his divorced mother when he was thirteen. He was a voracious reader and became a confirmed Democrat while at Indianapolis High School. In 1898 Bowers graduated and also won the state oratorical contest but was unable to attend college for lack of funds. Instead he worked for the publishing firm that later became the Bobbs-Merrill Company. In 1900 Bowers became the major editorial writer for the ...
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Bradford, John (1749-1830), first printer in Kentucky
Mary Kupiec Cayton
Bradford, John (06 June 1749–20 March 1830), first printer in Kentucky, was born in Prince William (later Fauquier) County, Virginia, the son of Daniel Bradford, a surveyor for Fauquier County, and Alice Morgan. He was one of eleven children in a family that probably also farmed. Bradford’s father taught him the craft of surveying. In 1771 John Bradford married Eliza James; they had five sons and four daughters....
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Brant, Irving Newton (17 January 1885–18 September 1976), biographer, journalist, and historian
Ann T. Keene
Brant, Irving Newton (17 January 1885–18 September 1976), biographer, journalist, and historian, was born in Walker, Iowa, the son of David Brant, the editor of the local newspaper, and Ruth Hurd Brant. Irving Brant decided on a career in journalism. He was educated in local schools and at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, from which he earned a BA in 1909....
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Brickman, William Wolfgang (1913-1986), scholar of the history of education and of comparative education
David S. Webster
Brickman, William Wolfgang (30 June 1913–22 June 1986), scholar of the history of education and of comparative education, was born in New York City, the son of David Shalom Brickman, a cutter in the clothing industry, and Chaya Sarah Shaber. After attending Jewish religious elementary and secondary schools in New York City, Brickman entered the City College of New York, where he earned a B.A. in education in 1934 and an M.S. in education in 1935. He received a Ph.D. in education, with a dissertation on Hermann Lietz, an early twentieth-century German educational reformer, from New York University (NYU) in 1938....
