Brantz Mayer | |
---|---|
Born | Baltimore, Maryland | 27 September 1809
Died | 23 February 1879 69) Baltimore, Maryland | (aged
Occupation | Author |
Brantz Mayer (September 27, 1809 – February 23, 1879) was an American writer, lawyer, and historian. In 1844, he founded the Maryland Historical Society, which is today the oldest cultural institution in the U.S. state of Maryland.
Brantz Mayer was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Christian Mayer and Anna Katherina Baum Mayer. [1] Christian Mayer was a German who emigrated in 1784 along with a friend, Lewis Brantz. [2] The two formed a business partnership that would last for decades, trading as far away as with the East Indies and Mexico.
In 1809, Christian Mayer had a second son (the first was lawyer Charles F. Mayer), whom he named after his friend and business partner. Childless himself, Lewis Brantz would eventually name the younger Mayer as his heir. [2]
After graduating from St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Brantz Mayer sailed for the East, visiting Java, Sumatra, and China, and returned in 1828. He studied law during this long voyage, and on his return home entered law school and was admitted to the bar in 1829. [3] He practiced law from 1832 until 1841, when he was appointed secretary of legation to Mexico, where he remained a year, and on his return edited for a short time the Baltimore American newspaper. Brantz Mayer was again secretary of the United States legation to Mexico in 1842 [4] and 1843. [3]
When he returned home after his 1843 visit, he published his first work, Mexico as it Was, and as it Is (Philadelphia, 1844), which was accused of unfairness and gave rise to animated controversy. In the winter of 1844, Mayer founded the Maryland Historical Society, the original object of which was “the collecting the scattered materials of the early history of the state, and for other collateral purposes.” In 1857, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. [5]
During the American Civil War, Mayer was an active Unionist, and in 1861 was appointed president of the Maryland Union State general committee, and did much to aid the Union cause. [3] In 1867, he was appointed a paymaster in the United States army, a post which he resigned in 1875. [1] He contributed to the Maryland Historical Society the Journal of Charles Carroll of Carrollton during his Mission to Canada, and Tah-gah-jute, or Logan and Captain Michael Cresap.
On September 27, 1835, Mayer married Mary Griswold, and they had five daughters. [1] Mayer remarried to Cornelia Poor, they had three daughters together. [1]
He died on February 23, 1879, at the age of sixty-nine. [1]
Among his works are:
His nephew Francis Blackwell Mayer was a noted artist. Another nephew, Alfred M. Mayer, brother of Francis, was a noted physicist. [3] His grandniece, Mary van Kleeck, was a social worker and radical labor activist. [7]
John Fiske was an American philosopher and historian. He was heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer and applied Spencer's concepts of evolution to his own writings on linguistics, philosophy, religion, and history.
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St. Mary's Seminary and University is a Catholic seminary located within the Archdiocese of Baltimore in Baltimore, Maryland; it was the first seminary founded in the United States after the Revolution and has been run since its founding by the Society of the Priests of Saint Sulpice.
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Francis Blackwell Mayer was a prominent 19th-century American genre painter from Maryland. While he spent most of his life in that state, he took a trip to the western frontier in the mid-nineteenth century and executed a series of drawings of Native Americans; he also studied in Paris for five years in the 1860s.
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Edwin Hamilton Davis was an American physician and self taught archaeologist who completed pioneering investigations of the mound builders in the Mississippi Valley. Davis gathered what, at that time, was the largest privately held collection of prehistoric Indian artifacts in the United States.
Charles Whittlesey was a soldier, geologist, historian, and an investigator of mounds relics of the United States. He is described by Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis in their book Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley as a "zealous investigator" in the field of "American antiquarian research."
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Charles Rau was an American archaeologist. He was a curator at the Smithsonian for more than a decade.
Alfred Marshall Mayer was an American physicist.
John Thomas Scharf was an American historian, author, journalist, antiquarian, politician, lawyer and Confederate States of America soldier and sailor. He is best known for his published historical works. Modern historians and researchers cite his comprehensive histories as primary source materials.
Lewis Brantz was a trader in Baltimore, Maryland; a ship captain; and the first president of the Baltimore and Port Deposit Railroad, part of the first rail link between Philadelphia and points south.
Charles Frederick Mayer (1795-1864) was an American lawyer, Maryland state senator, and railroad director.