Paul M. Birdsall (died May 2, 1970) was a historian and diplomat. Educated at St. Paul's School, he earned his doctorate at Harvard University in 1928, where he studied under the influence of Charles Howard McIlwain. [1] He taught European history at Williams College as assistant and then associate professor. In 1936 he became dean of students at Williams College. [2] He was also a trustee of Vassar College. [3] He then entered a career in government service. During World War Two, he served in the Office of Strategic Services. In 1947, he was assistant military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. In 1948-1949 he worked for the Brookings Institution. [4] He later served as a reserve foreign service officer in Paris and at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm. [5] According to obituaries, however, he actually worked for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1949 to 1962. [6] [7] Birdsall died at the age of seventy in Christiansted, United States Virgin Islands, where he had been in retirement for eight years.
He was the author of several works on diplomatic history. He is chiefly remembered for Versailles, 20 Years After, as well as a number of articles on the diplomacy of Woodrow Wilson. His sister Jean Birdsall was also a historian, having received her doctorate and serving as associate professor at Vassar until her death in 1935.
The American Historical Association awards a biennial prize in his honor to the author of the most important work on European military or strategic history since 1870 by a citizen of the United States or Canada. The prize was created through the gift of historian Hans W. Gatzke, who remained anonymous until his own death. [8]
Samuel Eliot Morison was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history and American history that were both authoritative and popular. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1959). In 1942, he was commissioned to write a history of United States naval operations in World War II, which was published in 15 volumes between 1947 and 1962. Morison wrote the popular Oxford History of the American People (1965), and co-authored the classic textbook The Growth of the American Republic (1930) with Henry Steele Commager.
St. Paul's School is a college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, affiliated with the Episcopal Church. The school's 2,000-acre (8.1 km2), or 3.125 square mile, campus serves 540 students, who come from 37 states and 28 countries.
The Noble and Greenough School, commonly known as Nobles, is a coeducational, nonsectarian day and five-day boarding school in Dedham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. It educates 638 boys and girls in grades 7–12. The school's 187-acre (0.76 km2) campus borders the Charles River.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is the graduate school of design at Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offers master's and doctoral programs in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, urban design, real estate, design engineering, and design studies.
Caroline Farrar Ware (1899–1990) was a professor of history and a New Deal activist. Her work focused on community development, consumer protection, industrial development, civil rights, and women's issues.
David Levering Lewis is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and professor emeritus of history at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. He is the first author to win Pulitzer Prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject.
Robin Cope Hartshorne is an American mathematician who is known for his work in algebraic geometry.
Oscar Handlin was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history, virtually inventing the field of immigration history in the 1950s. Handlin won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Uprooted (1951). Handlin's 1965 testimony before Congress was played an important role in passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished the discriminatory immigration quota system. According to historian James Grossman, "He reoriented the whole picture of the American story from the view that America was built on the spirit of the Wild West, to the idea that we are a nation of immigrants."
Charles Coulston Gillispie was an American historian of science. He was the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History of Science at Princeton University, and was credited with building Princeton's history of science program into a leading center for the field. He was best known for his general introduction to the history of science, The Edge of Objectivity, his deep two-volume study of French scientific history Science and Polity in France, and his chief editor role for the 16-volume, 5,000-entry Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
Daniel Walker Howe is an American historian who specializes in the early national period of U.S. history, with a particular interest in its intellectual and religious dimensions. He was Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University in England and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History for What Hath God Wrought (2007), his most famous book. He was president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2001, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Historical Society.
The Rev. Edmond La Beaume Cherbonnier was an American scholar in the field of religious studies. He served as Professor of Religion at Trinity College, Connecticut, and as a deacon in the Episcopal Church. He is known for his work on Christianity, analyzing idolatry and distinctions between mystical and biblical thought, his efforts on developing and advancing religious studies, and for founding the Religion Department at Trinity College in 1955.
Paul Herman Buck was an American historian. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1938 and became the first Provost of Harvard University in 1945.
Dennis Edwin Showalter was a professor emeritus of history at Colorado College. Showalter specialized in German military history. He was president of the American Society for Military History from 1997 to 2001. In addition, Showalter was an advising fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas.
Hans Wilhelm Gatzke (1915–1987) was a German-born historian of German foreign policy since World War I and belonged to the young emigrants from Nazi Germany who became historians in the United States. He is remembered by a named professorship in his honor at Williams College and a named dissertation prize at Yale University.
The Samuel Eliot Morison bibliography contains a list of books and articles written by American historian Samuel Eliot Morison.
Mary Clabaugh Wright was an American historian and sinologist who specialized in the study of late Qing dynasty and early twentieth century China. She was the first woman to gain tenure in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University, and subsequently the first woman to be appointed a full professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale.
Conyers Read was an American historian who specialized in the History of England in the 15th and 16th centuries. A professor of history at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, he was president of the American Historical Association for the year 1949–1950.
Alice Dorothea Snyder was an American professor of English at Vassar College and president of the Poughkeepsie Woman Suffrage Party. During the early 20th century, Snyder led the campaign that earned New York women the right to vote. Besides her positive impact to the women's rights movement, Snyder was an academic who focused on the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. British philosopher John Henry Muirhead called Snyder a "pioneer in the sympathetic re-examination of these manuscripts".