Ray Allen Billington

Ray Allen Billington (September 28, 1903 – March 7, 1981) was an American historian. He was born in Bay City, Michigan and died in San Marino, California.

Life

Billington studied at the University of Michigan, but was expelled. He held two Ph.D. degrees from University of Wisconsin 1926, and Harvard University 1933. He taught at Clark University, Smith College, Northwestern University, and served as a professor at Oxford University. He retired from his teaching career in 1964 and became the Senior Research Associate at the Huntington Library. He married Mabel R. Crotty; they had two children.^[1]

The Ray Allen Billington Prize is given biennially by the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American frontier history.^[2] Occidental College has begun a search for the Ray Allen Billington Distinguished Visiting Professor in U.S. History.^[3]

Awards

• Spur Award from Western Writers of America
• 1974 Bancroft Prize

Works

• "Words That Won the West", Lecture to the Public Relations Society of America, San Francisco, California, November 18, 1963

• America's Frontier Heritage Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963 (reprint University of New Mexico Press, 1993)
• The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860: a study of the origins of American nativism (1938) (reissue Rinehart, 1952)
• Ray Allen Billington, Martin Ridge (2001). Western Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. UNM Press. ISBN 9780826319814. http://books.google.com/books?id=YoV-k7VcyZ0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:Ray+inauthor:Allen+inauthor:Billington&cd=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false.  (1st edition 1949)
• American History After 1865. Rowman & Littlefield. 1975. ISBN 9780822600268. http://books.google.com/books?id=j5cUI9NPL6YC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:Ray+inauthor:Allen+inauthor:Billington&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false.  (1st edition 1950)
• The Far Western Frontier Harper, 1956
• Westward Movement in the United States Van Nostrand, 1959
• The Frontier Thesis R. E. Krieger Pub. Co., 1966; 1977
• The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis (1971)
• Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Teacher, Scholar. Oxford University Press, 1973
• Limericks: Hysterical and Historical
• Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century

References

External links

• "Ray Allen Billington", Find a Grave
• Richard W. Etulain, ed (2002). "Persistent Traits and Persistent Historian: The American Frontier and Ray Allen Billington". Writing Western history: essays on major Western historians. University of Nevada Press. ISBN 9780874175172. http://books.google.com/books?id=ld_yGLoFxwgC&pg=PA277&lpg=PA277&dq=Ray+Allen+Billington&source=bl&ots=-3Doeb7qHp&sig=fKxWth_WffJ47WeGrrdj8LRxPJQ&hl=en&ei=K-lPS5-XE4m2NtX11ZMJ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CBMQ6AEwBjge#v=onepage&q=Ray%20Allen%20Billington&f=false.