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Book Review
Worthington
Chauncey Ford: Scholar and Adventurer. By Louis Leonard Tucker. (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 2001. xvi, 247 pp. $45.00, ISBN 1-55553-480-5.)
| Louis
Leonard Tucker, former director of the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS),
has written the first book-length study of Worthington Chauncey Ford
(1858-1941), a leading force in the organizational revolution that
modernized historical scholarship in the United States. Little remembered
today, Ford was a prodigious historical editor, archivist, and bibliographer,
a 'workaholic' (Tucker's characterization) whose immense output
undergirded his reputation among his contemporaries as the premier authority
on the documents of early American history. Active in the American Historical
Association throughout his life, he served as its president in 1917. The
centerpiece of his career was his twenty years of service as editor of
publications and de facto director of the MHS (1909-1929). There, together
with his patron Charles Francis Adams, he strove to transform the MHS from an
insular 'social club' of self-selected Boston gentlemen into a major
scholarly research center for the study of American history, one whose vast
library holdings were, for the first time, made accessible to the interested
public. |
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