| Hubert Howe Bancroft | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 5, 1832 Granville, Ohio |
| Died | March 2, 1918 San Francisco, CA |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Known for | Early histories of California and the Pacific west coast |
Hubert Howe Bancroft (May 5, 1832 – March 2, 1918) was an American historian and ethnologist who wrote and published works concerning the western United States, Texas, Mexico, Central America, British Columbia and Alaska.
Contents |
Bancroft was born in Granville, Ohio to Azariah Ashley Bancroft and Lucy Howe Bancroft. His parents were staunch abolitionists. The family home was a station on the Underground Railroad, and is now a dormitory on the campus of Denison University.[1] He attended the Doane Academy in Granville for a year, and he then became a clerk in his brother-in-law's bookstore in Buffalo, New York.[2] In March 1852, he was sent to San Francisco, California, where he initiated and managed a regional office of the business. He also began his own publishing house. In 1868, he resigned from his business in favor of his brother, A. L. Bancroft. He had accumulated a great library of historical material, and abandoned business to devote himself entirely to writing and publishing history.[3]
Bancroft's library consisted of books, maps, and printed and manuscript documents, including a large number of narratives dictated to Bancroft or his assistants by pioneers, settlers, and statesmen. The indexing of this vast collection employed six persons for ten years. The library was moved in 1881 to a fireproof building, and in 1900 numbered about 45,000 volumes.[3]
He developed a plan to publish a history of 39 volumes of the history of the entire Pacific coast region of North America, from Central America to Alaska. He employed collaborators for the preliminary work, and then revised it all, and wrote the most important chapters himself. In 1886 the publishing establishment of A. L. Bancroft & Company burned, and the sheets of seven volumes of the history he had written were destroyed.[3]
Bancroft's first marriage was to Emily Ketchum in 1859. They had one daughter, Kate. Emily died in 1869. Bancroft married again in 1879. His second wife was Matilda Coley Griffing. They had four children, Paul, Griffing, Philip and Lucy.
Bancroft died in 1918 in Walnut Creek, California, two days after being struck by a street car. He is interred in the Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, named in his honor, was founded when the University of California purchased his book collection in 1905. Part of a property Bancroft bought (c.1880) in Contra Costa County, California, is now the Ruth Bancroft Garden. An archive of Bancroft family correspondence, collected by his daughter Kate, is held in the Mandeville Special Collections Library in the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.
Bancroft published a well-known group of local histories. Having formed a large collection of materials concerning the history of the Pacific coast, he then employed research and writing assistants to organize and produce statements of facts for large sections of a proposed general history. Originally he seems to have intended to use these statements of facts as the basis of a narrative which he himself would write; but as the work progressed he came to use the statements as they were, with only slight changes. He said his assistants were capable investigators, and there is independent evidence to show that some of them deserved his confidence. (Frances Fuller Victor, in particular, was a well regarded writer in her own right.) However, his failure to acknowledge each contribution created doubt concerning the value of any particular section. Overall, although Bancroft considered himself the author of the work, it is more accurate to consider him an editor and compiler.[4]
Neither Bancroft, nor most of his assistants, had preparatory training sufficient to save them from the inadequacies common to historical works of this period. Their writing sometimes represented personal opinions and enthusiasms, and their often-good books consequently have some serious defects. However, they were generally very well-received in their time. Historian Francis Parkman gave Bancroft's The Native Races much credit in the magazine The North American Review. Lewis H. Morgan, however, was more critical. Based on his newly-published theory of Indian culture, in an article named Montezuma's Dinner, Morgan completely reversed Parkman's verdict and created doubt in the minds of the public about this and other volumes of the series. Bancroft's response to Morgan's criticism suggests that he did not understand Morgan's theory, which is now generally accepted by scholars.[4]
Several schools are named for Bancroft, including Bancroft Middle School (Los Angeles) Bancroft Middle School in Long Beach, California and Hubert H. Bancroft Elementary school in Sacramento.
In 1885 Bancroft purchased a ranch with an adobe home on it located in Spring Valley, in San Diego County, as a retirement home. It now is a National Historic Landmark.