Channing, Edward (15 June 1856–07 January 1931), historian, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the son of William Ellery Channing, a poet, and Ellen Kilshaw Fuller, a sister of the famous reformer Margaret Fuller. Channing married Alice Thatcher in 1886; they had two daughters. Much of Channing’s life was centered around Harvard University, from which he had graduated in 1878 with honors in history. As an undergraduate Channing had been especially drawn to the teaching style and critical stance of Henry Adams and equally repulsed by the orthodoxy of Henry Cabot Lodge. By the time he received his Ph.D. in 1880, with a dissertation on the Louisiana Purchase, Channing knew that he wanted to teach U.S. history at Harvard. It took him just three years to secure such a position, during which time he traveled to Europe, wrote articles on geography for Science, and nurtured his connections with the Harvard faculty. He remained at Harvard until his retirement in 1929.

Channing’s historical writing began in the same year as his teaching career. In 1883 he won the Robert N. Toppan Prize for an essay titled “Town and County Government in the English Colonies.” Published the following year as a volume in the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, this short work also helped Channing gain election to the elite Massachusetts Historical Society. Channing presented the work in briefer form in 1884 as the first paper at the first meeting of the American Historical Association. In 1897 he coauthored Guide to the Study of American History with Albert Bushnell Hart and that same year published a small textbook on America from 1765 to 1865 in the Cambridge Historical Series. Over the next two decades Channing published an English history text with Thomas Wentworth Higginson and numerous textbooks, short histories, articles, and document collections on the United States. Channing’s most popular textbook, A Student’s History of the United States (1898), went through five editions by 1924. The Jeffersonian System, 1801–1811 (1906), was Channing’s contribution to Hart’s famous American Nation Series.

Once Channing began his “Great Work,” as he and his students habitually referred to his mammoth History of the United States, he took little time for anything else. The first of a projected eight volumes, The Planting of a Nation in the New World, 1000–1660, was issued in 1905. The volumes then appeared at approximately four-year intervals until the Pulitzer Prize–winning volume six, on the Civil War era, was published in 1925. Thereafter, Channing’s age slowed him down considerably. He was laboring at his desk on volume seven on the day before his death of a cerebral hemorrhage in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Channing’s preface to volume one of History foretold a great deal about the finished product. He intended to treat the growth of the nation as one continuous development, he announced, “from the political, military, institutional, industrial and social points of view.” Channing’s belief in progress, doubtless influenced by the evolutionary climate of opinion in his day, was made clear in what he called the “guiding idea” of his History: “to view the subject as the record of an evolution, . . . [as] the story of living forces, always struggling onward and upward toward that which is better and higher in human conception.” Closely related to this guiding idea was what Channing saw as “the most important single fact in our development,” which he described as “the victory of the forces of union over those of particularism.” Finally, Channing knew that “the time and place of one’s birth and breeding affect the judgment [of the historian], and the opportunity for error is frequent.” In light of this he always tried, and urged others to try, to judge historical figures by the standards of their own time: “To estimate them by the conditions and ideas of the present day is to give a false picture.”

In both volume three, The American Revolution, 1761–1789 (1912), and volume six, The War for Southern Independence (1925), Channing’s narrative has a strong central theme, weighted toward the political history that he understood best. While he devotes more than half of volume five to the topics of society and culture, his efforts in these areas seem strangely disconnected from the overall emphasis of his History. Examining in volume three the economic causes of the revolutionary break in America’s evolution within the British Empire, he writes, “Commercialism, the desire for advantage and profit in trade and industry, was at the bottom of the struggle between England and America.” In the work’s preface he had already placed himself within the “Imperial School” of colonial historians, writing that he “considered the colonies as parts of the English empire, as having sprung from that political fabric, and as having simply pursued a course of institutional evolution unlike that of the branch of the English race which remained behind in the old homeland across the Atlantic.”

Although volume six stresses his theme of union over particularism, Channing is unable to offer as coherent an explanation of the Civil War as he had offered of the Revolution in volume three. His theory, though complex, may offer a more realistic picture of how the war came about than those of historians who seek succinct explanations. According to Channing, the war resulted from a natural, environmentally produced sectionalism in which the two leading factors were slavery (in the economic and social arenas) and divergent views over the nature of the union (in the political arena). Soon after it began, however, the war became purely emotional: “The psychology of men’s actions is often beyond the ken of the historian; but in this case sentiment overruled every other consideration in the North—and in the South.”

The day after Channing’s death, the Boston Herald declared, “The most eminent of contemporary American writers of history is gone.” While historians have challenged Channing’s faith in progress, questioned many of his judgments, and added significant new historical actors and dilemmas to his narrative, Channing was, in his own time, a distinguished teacher, a pioneering textbook author, and a tireless chronicler of the evolution of America.