Imperial women: collective biography, gender, and Yale-trained historians

Abstract

Summary of sources for biographical data only. Paper presented to Workshop on Biographies and Autobiographies of Historians, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 4 July 2015.

This summary is posted online in order to avoid lengthening the paper itself by repeatedly citing sources for basic biographical information. Because the paper deals primarily, among those who signed the Dedication section of Essays in Colonial History Presented to Charles McLean Andrews by his Students, with the women signatories, they are listed here first and in the greatest detail. Brief summaries follow for the men, who in the paper are treated only for certain comparisons. Selected standard biographical dictionaries were consulted: Who’s Who in America [WWA], 1910-11, 1920-21, 1930-31, 1940-41, 1950-51, 1960-61, and 1970-71; Directory of American Scholars [DAS], 1942, 1951, 1957, and 1978. Public documents such as censuses, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, draft cards, passport applications, and passenger lists were searched through (and only through) Ancestry.com. Library catalogues, including the Library of Congress, were used for those who published. A few individuals were the subjects of published biographical studies, and others had deposited papers at a variety of repositories that were summarized along with biographical information in finding aids available online. Other online sources were also consulted, as found through standard search procedures. For the Yale-linked signatories, a valuable specific source was the listing of PhD dissertations in History posted at http://history.yale.edu/academics/graduate-program/yale-history-dissertations. Also consulted were the relevant consolidated alumni catalogues: Bryn Mawr College Calendar: Register of Alumnae and Former Students, 1916, comp. Isabel Maddison (Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr College, 1916) [BMC 1916]; Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Yale University, 1701-1924 (New Haven: Yale University, 1924) [YD 1924]; and Catalogue of Yale University Alumni, 1925-54 (New Haven: Yale University, 1955) [YD 1955]. Some biographical details were inferred from correspondence in Charles McLean Andrews Papers (MS 38), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library [CMAP]. I am very grateful to my research assistant and former graduate student Samantha Bourgoin for her diligence in setting the foundations for these biographical compilations.