George Bancroft - Wikipedia

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that October 3 is the anniversary of the birth of American historian and statesman George Bancroft who was prominent in promoting secondary education both in his home state, at the national and international level.
Notably he established the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845.

Naval Academy Namesakes: Ep. 1 "Bancroft Hall"
"In this series on Naval Academy history, we will highlight the buildings and monuments around the Yard and the historic figures for which they are named, beginning with USNA's founder, former Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S6jaUL4WgI

Images:
1. George Bancroft at his desk;
2. Painting of the literary circle of Washington Irving;
3. George Bancroft is on the far right; George Bancroft
4. George Bancroft late in life - courtesy of Harvard University Archives

Rest in peace George Bancroft!

1. Background from harvardmagazine.com/2008/05/george-bancroft-html
"IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY America, George Bancroft’s was a household name in polite, middle-class society. Generations of families purchased his multivolume History of the United States to understand the origins and trajectory of their young republic. With his flair for grand, triumphalist storytelling, Bancroft, A.B. 1817, A.M. 1818, aided his fellow citizens’ nation-building by providing a comforting, usable narrative. Yet his own estrangement from Boston and his alma mater gave him as well a lifelong outsider’s perspective on both past and contemporary politics.

The farmer’s son from Worcester, Massachusetts, joined the regional elite by graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy and entering Harvard College at 13. There he came under the influence of President John Thornton Kirkland, who encouraged him to continue his studies abroad. At Kirkland’s behest, he sailed for Germany in 1818 to obtain a doctorate in philology.

The university at Göttingen opened his eyes to a world of research scholarship then rarely seen in Anglophone institutions, especially in America, and once back in Boston, in 1822, he felt his novel degree entitled him to privileged treatment. During a two-week visit to Cambridge, he lectured both Kirkland and senior professors on German-style college reform and his right to a faculty position. His insulted mentors, virtually none of whom held doctorates themselves, offered him only a temporary lectureship.

He soon resigned—Harvard was “a sick and wearisome place” —and co-founded a progressive primary school in Northampton. In 1827, his marriage to the wealthy Sarah Dwight enabled him to pursue an independent intellectual life, and in 1834 he released the first volume of his monumental History. Financial freedom also left time for political involvement. Though courted by both Democrats and Whigs, Bancroft eventually allied himself with the former, writing in his History that “our government…is necessarily identified with the interests of the people.” Like most Democrats, he hailed “the masses of mankind themselves awakening to the knowledge and the care of their own interests.” Early campaign failures did little to dampen his enthusiasm for politics or his scholarly belief in popular sovereignty as the fount of American uniqueness in the world. Neither did the opprobrium of his native Whig-dominated New England, which considered his Democratic political loyalties a wounding betrayal.

Bancroft entered national politics in 1844, canvassing vigorously for Democratic presidential candidate James K. Polk. In aligning himself with the “young Democracy” theme of that campaign, he also entered the “Young America” circle, a cluster of expansionist Democrats who wished to “liberate” North America and republicanize Old Europe. Later, as Polk’s new secretary of the navy, he ordered American forces ashore to capture California during the Mexican War, thus “taking possession of the wilderness.” Although “we have got into a little war,” he euphemized, western soil naturally belonged to the United States. (He also established what became the U.S. naval academy, to make sailors “as distinguished for culture as they have been for gallant conduct.”)

Meanwhile, liberal unrest in Europe vied for his attention along with domestic affairs. As he wrote several years later, “Has the echo of American Democracy which you now hear from France, & Austria & Prussia & all Old Germany, no power to stir up the hearts of the American people to new achievements?” He gladly accepted Polk’s offer of the ambassadorship to England and, during his three years in London, secured mutual free-trade agreements, collected documents for future volumes of his History, and cheered attempts to dethrone Continental monarchies in favor of republican forms of government. In 1847 he visited Paris and met “citizen king” Louis Philippe, who shrugged off signs of an impending revolution; after the 1848 uprising, Bancroft reported, “If France succeeds, there will not be a crown left in Europe in twenty years, except in Russia.” People were not meant to be “the slaves of a dynasty,” and the United States held the moral obligation to democratize the world by both deed and example. “Let the young aspirant after glory scatter the seeds of truth,” he urged.

When the Whig administration of Zachary Taylor turned him out of office in 1849, Bancroft settled in New York and Washington and focused primarily on historical research and writing. Out of power, he watched with horror as his subject, the United States, disintegrated. His argument that God had uniquely guided America away from turmoil and toward increasing glory suffered a major setback with the onset of the Civil War, and he hoped that “our little domestic strife is no more than a momentary disturbance.” Though he supported Lincoln’s energetic prosecution of a war for the Union (and later against slavery), he grew disillusioned with northern factionalism and southern intransigence alike.

Stubbornly, his optimism survived both the crisis of the Union and the corruptions of the Gilded Age. Since affliction stood as the “instrument of Divine providence,” strengthening the nation by testing it, America’s growing pains served merely as preludes to the success he still believed forthcoming. One need only “follow the steps by which a favoring Providence…has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory.”

2. Background from study.com/academy/lesson/george-bancroft-19th-century-historiography-in-the-us.html
"How do nations build a national history? It's an interesting question, and in this lesson we'll explore the role of George Bancroft in establishing American national history.
George Bancroft
What does a national history look like? Think about this. Most nations have a definitive version of their national history which they teach and recycle, and in some cases this history can be very old. The United States, however, is not very old.
When the USA was established, its founding figures had to figure out how to create things that other nations had maintained for generations. England had a long sense of national history, now how could the USA start to build one? There were several attempts at answering this, but none was as influential as that of George Bancroft (1800-1891). This 19th-century statesman and historian would help shape America's national history in more ways than one.
Life of George Bancroft
George Bancroft was born in Massachusetts in 1800. Like most well-to-do youths, he started school at a young age and very quickly excelled at it. In fact, he ended up attending college at Harvard. When he was 13 years old.
Bancroft graduated from Harvard in 1817 and went to Cambridge to study theology and become a minister, but his teachers encouraged him to study abroad. So, he went where all promising intellectuals of the day went: Germany. The German universities were filled with the intellectual movement of Romanticism, which sought truth through primordial emotion and universal roots of human existence. Throughout his time in Germany, Bancroft would attend universities in Heidelberg, Berlin, and Gottingen. He studied under some of the greatest minds in the world, and was particularly influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel and others impressed on Bancroft the concept that all human societies developed along the same model, because society was a reflection of a universal human nature.
Once back in the United States, Bancroft founded his own private school called Round Hill and taught there for several years. He later entered into government work, first as a prominent member of the Democratic Party and then breaking with them over the issue of slavery and joining the young Republican Party. He eventually held positions as secretary of the Navy, ambassador to Great Britain, as well as minister to Prussia and the German Empire before his death in 1891.
Bancroft's History
An avid intellectual, Bancroft was very interested in history, which was a subject the German universities had instructed him in. It's important to remember that academia was very different in the USA back then; you didn't have to be attached to a university to be a historian. Amateurs and professionals worked together, and Bancroft was somewhere in between these categories.
In the 1830s, Bancroft began compiling research on American history. People had studied the history of the USA before, but it was generally focused purely on the Revolution, and studied state-by-state. Bancroft, however, envisioned a more comprehensive history for the United States. He published the first volume of this history in 1834. Over the next forty years, he'd publish an additional nine volumes.
Bancroft's history of the USA was unlike anything that people had read before. On one hand, it carried all the emotional language of German Romanticism. On the other, it looked at American history as a whole, not through individual states, and covered topics like the colonial era, foreign relations, and the concept of the frontier. These were all ideas that nobody had tackled as an important part of the national historical narrative, but Bancroft did. It was immediately successful and completely changed the ways Americans thought about their own national history.

As historians, we need to also acknowledge Bancroft's methods. Bancroft believed strongly in the value of using original sources whenever possible and he dug through archives in the United States and Europe to secure the sources he needed. This makes Bancroft one of the first historians of the 19th century to rely heavily on primary sources, and certainly the first to do so in studying American history."


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Great bio and history share sir, thank you.

Maj Marty Hogan Brilliant man.