Abel-Henderson, Annie Heloise (18 February 1873–14 March 1947), historian and author, was born in Fernhurst, Sussex, England, the daughter of George Abel and Amelia Anne Hogben. Her parents had immigrated to the United States in 1871 but had not found Kansas frontier life appealing and returned home to England. In 1884, however, they went back to Salina, Kansas, where George Abel worked as a gardener. Abel and two sisters joined their parents in 1885....
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Abel-Henderson, Annie Heloise (1873-1947), historian and author
Marilyn Elizabeth Perry
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Acrelius, Israel (1714-1800), Lutheran clergyman and author
Thaddeus Russell
Acrelius, Israel (04 December 1714–25 April 1800), Lutheran clergyman and author, was born in Öster-Âker, Sweden, the son of Johan Acrelius, a pastor, and Sara Gahm. At the age of twelve he entered the University of Uppsala, where he trained for the ministry and received his ordination in 1743. Acrelius then served as a domestic chaplain until 1745, when he became the pastor of Riala, Kulla, and Norra Ljusterö....
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Adams, Charles Francis (1835-1915), railroad official, civic leader, and historian
John F. Stover
Adams, Charles Francis (27 May 1835–20 March 1915), railroad official, civic leader, and historian, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886), a diplomat and politician, and Abigail Brown Brooks. He was the grandson of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) and great-grandson of ...
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Adams, Charles Francis (1835-1915)
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Charles Francis Adams, Jr. During his Civil War service. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-B8171-7390).
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Adams, George Burton (1851-1925), historian
Laura R. Robinson
Adams, George Burton (03 June 1851–26 May 1925), historian, was born in Fairfield, Vermont, the son of Calvin Carlton Adams, a Congregational clergyman, and Emeline Nelson. Adams attended Beloit College in Wisconsin, from which he received a B.A. in 1873. He then enrolled at Yale University, returning temporarily to teach at Beloit in 1874–1875. He earned a B.D. from Yale in 1877....
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Adams, Herbert Baxter (1850-1901), historian and educator
Raymond J. Cunningham
Adams, Herbert Baxter (16 April 1850–30 July 1901), historian and educator, was born in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, the son of Nathaniel Dickinson Adams, a lumber merchant, and Harriet Hastings. Adams’s father died when the boy was six; as a result the family moved to nearby Amherst where his mother had relatives. There he attended local schools and later Phillips Exeter Academy....
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Alexander, De Alva Stanwood (1845-1925), congressman and historian
John D. Buenker
Alexander, De Alva Stanwood (17 July 1845–30 January 1925), congressman and historian, was born in Richmond, Maine, the son of Stanwood Alexander and Priscilla Brown. When his father died in 1852, Alexander and his mother moved to Ohio, where he lived until his enlistment, at the age of sixteen, in the Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. After the war he completed his education at the Edward Little Institute in Auburn, Maine, and graduated from Bowdoin College in 1870. He later served for several years on Bowdoin’s board of overseers. In 1871 he married Alice Colby; their childless union ended with her death in 1890....
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Alexander, William DeWitt (1833-1913), historian
Paul David Nelson
Alexander, William DeWitt (02 April 1833–22 February 1913), historian, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii (then the Sandwich Islands), the son of William Patterson Alexander and Mary Ann McKinley, Christian missionaries. His parents had joined the famous missionary Hiram Bingham the year before Alexander’s birth in an attempt to convert the islanders to Christianity. Alexander received his earliest education at Punahou School in Honolulu and then was sent by his parents to his mother’s birthplace, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to study for admission to college. In 1855 he graduated with a B.A. from Yale University and took a teaching position at Beloit College in Wisconsin. Shortly thereafter he moved to another teaching job in Vincennes, Indiana. Returning to the Hawaiian Islands in 1858, he married Abigail Charlotte Baldwin. In 1860 he became a professor of Greek at Punahou School. For the remainder of his life he pursued academic and religious interests....
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Alvord, Clarence Walworth (1868-1928), historian
Dominic F. Abram
Alvord, Clarence Walworth (21 May 1868–24 January 1928), historian, was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the son of Daniel Wells, a lawyer, and Caroline Betts Dewey. He attended the schools of Northampton, Massachusetts, and Phillips Academy, Andover, and graduated from Williams College in 1891. From 1891 to 1893 he taught at Milton Academy in Massachusetts. He was married in 1893 to Jennie Kettell Blanchard Parrott. From 1893 to 1895 he did graduate work in history at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. For part of the following year, Alvord studied European history at the University of Chicago, concentrating on the Italian Renaissance. He became an instructor in the preparatory school of the University of Illinois in 1897 and in 1901 began teaching European history in the university proper. There he would stay until 1920, receiving a Ph.D. in 1908 and becoming a full professor in 1913....
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Ambrose, Stephen Edward (10 January 1936–13 October 2002)
Bruce J. Evensen
Ambrose, Stephen Edward (10 January 1936–13 October 2002), historian and biographer, was born in Decatur, Illinois, the middle son of Stephen Hedges Ambrose, a family physician, and Rosepha Trippe Ambrose. Rosepha raised her sons on a family farm in Whitewater, Wisconsin, during World War II after her husband enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Stephen Ambrose greatly admired the returning veterans who had served in the global conflict. The teamwork they had learned in the service, Ambrose would later write, enabled these men to build “modern America” (...
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Andrews, Charles McLean (1863-1943), historian
Stephen Saunders Webb
Andrews, Charles McLean (22 February 1863–09 September 1943), historian, was born in Wethersfield, Connecticut, the son of the Reverend William Watson Andrews and Elizabeth Williams. Andrews was a remarkably normal New England boy: mischievous (his elementary school teacher in Wethersfield predicted that her pupil would “come to some bad end”); unstudious (graduating from Hartford High School in 1879, “he took no prizes and had no honor standing”); uncertain (as a sophomore at Trinity College, Andrews wanted to drop out and “go to work”); and parochial (he went no further than the West Hartford High School for a job, becoming principal there on his graduation from Trinity in 1884). It was only because he disliked disruptive students in large numbers that Andrews turned to a new option for the unfocused: graduate school. There he found a profession with which he could mature....
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Angle, Paul McClelland (1900-1975), historian and museum director
Michael Perman
Angle, Paul McClelland (25 December 1900–11 May 1975), historian and museum director, was born in Mansfield, Ohio, the son of John Elmer Angle, a grocer, and Nellie Laverne McClelland. After spending his freshman year at Oberlin College, he transferred to Miami University at Ohio and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1922. Two years later, he received an M.A. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then took a job with the American Book Company selling textbooks and in 1925 accepted the secretaryship of a little-known historical society in Springfield, Illinois, the Abraham Lincoln Centennial Association. In 1926 he married Vesta Verne Magee, a fellow student at Miami; they had two children....
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Arnold, Richard Dennis (1808-1876), physician
John H. Ellis
Arnold, Richard Dennis (19 August 1808–10 July 1876), physician, was born in Savannah, Georgia, the son of Joseph Arnold and Eliza Dennis, occupations unknown. Despite hardships accompanying the deaths of both parents during childhood, Arnold, who had been an only child, received an excellent preliminary education and graduated with distinction from Princeton in 1826. He immediately began a medical apprenticeship under William R. Waring, a distinguished preceptor and member of an illustrious Charleston and Savannah family of physicians. After receiving his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1830, Arnold served for two years as a resident house officer in Philadelphia’s old Blockley Hospital before returning to Savannah where in 1833 he married Margaret Baugh Stirk. Their only child, Eleanor, born the next year, became the lifelong object of her father’s loving solicitude following her mother’s untimely death from pulmonary tuberculosis in 1850....
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Atherton, Gertrude Franklin (1857-1948)
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Gertrude Atherton Arnold Genthe, 1912. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-G432-0120).
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Atherton, Gertrude Franklin (1857-1948), author, biographer, and historian
Elaine Oswald
Atherton, Gertrude Franklin (30 October 1857–14 June 1948), author, biographer, and historian, was born Gertrude Franklin Horn in San Francisco, California, the daughter of Thomas Horn, a businessman, and Gertrude Franklin. Her maternal grandfather, a grandnephew of Benjamin Franklin, was a banker and editor of one of San Francisco’s first newspapers. Gertrude lived with him when her parents were divorced after three years of marriage. Although she was well read, her formal education was sporadic—while she was attending the Sayre Institute in Lexington, Kentucky, she contracted tuberculosis. After twice becoming engaged, she eventually eloped in 1876 with George H. Bowen Atherton, a former suitor of her mother’s. They had a daughter and a son who died at the age of six....
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Bailey, Thomas Andrew (1902-1983), historian
Alexander DeConde
Bailey, Thomas Andrew (14 December 1902–26 July 1983), historian, was born in San Jose, California, the son of James A. Bailey, a fruit farmer, and Annie Mary Nelson, a grade-school teacher. Bailey entered Stanford University in 1920, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received the B.A. (1924), M.A. (1925), and Ph.D. (1927) degrees. In August 1928, while teaching at the University of Hawaii, he married Sylvia Dean, the daughter of the university’s former president; they had one child....
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Bancroft, Frederic A. (1860-1945), historian, librarian, and philanthropist
John David Smith
Bancroft, Frederic A. (30 October 1860–22 February 1945), historian, librarian, and philanthropist, was born Frederic Austin Bancroft in Galesburg, Illinois, the son of Addison Newton Bancroft, a businessman, and Catherine Blair. Bancroft, raised in abolitionist surroundings, attended school at Knox Academy, Knox College (1878–1881), transferred to Amherst College in 1881, and graduated a year later. He entered Columbia University’s School of Political Science in 1882 to study southern history with ...
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Bancroft, George (1800-1891), scholar and diplomat
Lilian Handlin
Bancroft, George (03 October 1800–17 January 1891), scholar and diplomat, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of Aaron Bancroft, the founder of Worcester’s Second Congregational Society and later president of the American Unitarian Association, and Lucretia Chandler. The eighth of thirteen children, George passed his childhood in a frugal rural household dominated by paternal activism. In 1811 he entered the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, run by Benjamin Abbot, a family friend. Attending with a scholarship, Bancroft received a solid grounding in classics, which prepared him for Harvard, where he enrolled at the age of thirteen....
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Bancroft, George (1800-1891)
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George Bancroft. Half-plate daguerreotype (hand-colored), c. 1847, by John Jabez Edwin Mayall. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Dr. and Mrs. Lester Tuchman and Gallery purchase.
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Bancroft, Hubert Howe (1832-1918), businessman and historian
David J. Weber
Bancroft, Hubert Howe (05 May 1832–02 March 1918), businessman and historian, was born in Granville, Ohio, the son of Azariah Ashley Bancroft, a farmer, and Lucy Howe, a teacher. His formal education stopped short of college, and at age sixteen Bancroft left home to learn the book trade from his brother-in-law in Buffalo, New York. Sent to California with a valuable consignment of books, Bancroft opened his own bookstore in San Francisco in December 1856, with capital supplied by his sister and credit from several New York firms. Efficiently run, and favored by a margin between California gold and depreciated eastern currency during the Civil War, Bancroft’s store proved phenomenally profitable. Within a decade, H. H. Bancroft & Co. supported extensive European travel for its proprietor and permitted him the luxury of semiretirement at age thirty-seven. In 1869–1870 he built a five-story building for his business, which expanded to include stationery, office supplies, printing, and bookbinding. He turned over the day-to-day operations to his younger brother, Albert, while he moved into the fifth floor and devoted himself to the study of history....
