American National Biography

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The American National Biography , ANB for short , is a biographical reference work that has been published by Oxford University Press since 1999 and is equivalent to a national biography of the United States . The responsible editors are currently the historians Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty .

history

The ANB emerged from the Dictionary of American Biography , which the American Council of Learned Societies , an umbrella organization of the scientific societies of the USA, commissioned in the mid-1920s. The project was also financially supported by the New York Times . The model was the British Dictionary of National Biography . Under the editorship of Allen Johnson (until 1931) and Dumas Malone (1931-1936) the original twenty volumes with 13,633 biographies of important Americans and some other personalities who have played a role in American history were published between 1927 and 1936. By 1995, 10 supplement volumes had appeared .

Since many of the biographies no longer corresponded to the state of research over the years, the American Council of Learned Societies decided to fundamentally revise them under the title American National Biography . The project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others . The 24 volumes of the new series appeared in 1999 and comprise almost 17,500 entries. At the same time an online version ( American National Biography Online ) was set up, which has been continuously expanded since then; a first printed supplement was published in 2002.

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