George Bancroft (politician)

George Bancroft

George Bancroft (born October 3, 1800 in Worcester , Massachusetts , †  January 17, 1891 in Washington DC ) was an American historian and politician. One of his most famous works is the twelve-volume History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent .

Youth and first job

George Bancroft was born the son of Aaron Bancroft, a leading Unitarian . He first attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire before starting his studies at Harvard College in Cambridge at the age of 13 . From 1818 he continued his studies in Göttingen , Heidelberg and Berlin together with Arnold Heeren , Albert Eichhorn and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach before he received his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1820 . He then traveled to Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy. During this trip he met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Friedrich Schleiermacher , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , George Gordon Byron , Barthold Georg Niebuhr , Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Alessandro Manzoni , among others .

After returning to the United States in 1822, he tried his hand at first as a preacher; dissatisfied with this, he became a teacher of the Greek language at Cambridge University. Shortly afterwards, in 1823, he and Cogswell founded the Round Hill School in Northampton, where he preferred to employ German teachers, including the radical democrat and writer Karl Follen . First publications in the North American Review and American Quarterly appeared during this time.

In 1827, Bancroft and his first wife, Sarah Dwight, married; they had two sons. After her death in 1837, he married the widow Elizabeth Davis Bliss, who brought two girls into the marriage. The two had another daughter together.

Political career

After an employment as a collector (chief customs director) of the port of Boston and an unsuccessful candidacy for the office of governor of Massachusetts, the Democrat Bancroft was appointed by US President James K. Polk in 1845 as Secretary of the Navy in his cabinet . He founded the Naval Academy in Annapolis and an observatory in Washington .

From 1846 to 1849 he was the United States Ambassador to London. He returned to the States in 1850 and lived in New York City , spending the summer months in Newport . During this time he was busy completing his History of the United States , which became a standard work of American historiography. A continuation of this work is the History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of 1882. Bancroft became "the most important interpreter of American history in the 19th century"; It is ultimately thanks to him that the controversy over the right interpretation of the American Revolution was ended and instead the detachment from the motherland was now understood as "an expression of the unstoppable triumph of democracy in the world".

From 1867 to 1874 Bancroft lived as the United States Ambassador in Berlin; There he founded the so-called Bancroft Treaties in negotiations with Prussia and other northern German states , which regulated the right to naturalization of citizens living abroad and became the basis of international legislation. He then withdrew back into private life.

In 1841 he became an elected member of the American Philosophical Society . Since 1845 he was a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In 1863 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1867 to the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg . In 1868 he was elected a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

Roses

George Bancroft had a remarkable collection of roses at his summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. In his garden, George Field discovered an unnamed variety that Field & Brothers introduced as 'American Beauty' in 1886 . The rose later turned out to be the 'Mme Ferdinand Jamin' variety introduced by Lédéchaux in 1875.

Commemoration

In addition to various streets, schools and buildings, three ships were named after Bancroft ( USS Bancroft ). The Naval Academy's dormitory in Annapolis also bears his name.

In 1890 a memorial plaque was attached to his house in Göttingen at Weender Straße 77.

plant

• History of the colonization of the United States
• History of the Revolution of North America (Boston 1855, 3 vol .; German, Leipzig 1852–1864, 5 vol.).
• History of the United States (1834–1874, 10 vol .; new edition, 1883, 6 vol .; German, Leipzig 1847–1875)
• A. Lincoln, a memorial address (Washington. 1866)
• Literary and historical miscellanies (1855)
• History of the formation of the constitution of the United States (1882, 2 vol.)

literature

• Ursula Brumm : George Bancroft. Historian, diplomat and friend of Berlin . In: Jörg Helbig (Ed.): Welcome to Berlin. The image of Berlin in the English-speaking world from 1700 until today . Stapp, Berlin 1987.
• MA DeWolfe Howe: The Life and Letters of George Bancroft . 2 volumes. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1908.
• Lilian Handlin: George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat . Harper & Row, New York NY 1984, ISBN 0-06-039033-6 .
• David Levin: History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman . Stanford University Press, Stanford CA 1959.
• Bancroft, George . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 3 : Austria - Bisectrix . London 1910, p. 307 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Commons : George Bancroft  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Certification and reception of foreign envoys at the North German Confederation. February 29, 1868  - Sources and full texts

Wikisource: Agreement between the North German Confederation and the United States of America, concerning the citizenship of those persons who immigrate from the area of ​​one part to that of the other part  - sources and full texts

• Entry on George Bancroft in the Database of Classical Scholars (English)
• George Bancroft in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Horst Dippel: The American Revolution 1763–1787 . S. 12 .
2. ^ Member History: George Bancroft. American Philosophical Society, accessed April 19, 2018 . 
3. ^ Members of the previous academies. George Bancroft. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on February 18, 2015 . 
4. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. George Bancroft. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 7, 2015 . 
5. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 31.
6. ^ Member entry by George Bancroft (with a link to an obituary) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on January 9, 2017.
7. ^ Walter Nissen: Göttingen memorial tablets. Göttingen 1962, p. 20.