Edward Perkins Channing

Edward Perkins Channing (June 15, 1856 – January 7, 1931) was an American historian and an author of a monumental History of the United States in six volumes, for which he won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for History. His thorough research in printed sources and judicious judgments made the book a standard reference for scholars for decades. Channing taught at Harvard 1883–1929 and trained many PhD's who became professors at major universities.

Edward Channing was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the fifth child of Ellen Kilshaw Fuller (1820–56), a sister of Margaret Fuller, and William Ellery Channing (1818–1901), the poet and walking companion of Henry David Thoreau. Some months after his birth, his mother died, and he was placed out with a shoemaker and his wife in Abington, Mass. Some time around 1860, his paternal grandfather Walter Channing and his daughter took care of him. Young Edward Channing attended a private school and entered Harvard College in autumn 1874. He received his A.B. in 1878, and two years later he received his PhD. in history with a thesis on the Louisiana Purchase. In 1880, his grandfather died, leaving an inheritance of $300. He undertook a nine-months tour through Europe, which led him also to the Near East and North Africa. After he returned, he wrote geographical articles for Science, for example about the Sudan and geography-instruction at German schools. In 1883, he became an instructor of history at Harvard University and an assistant for professor Charles Cutler Torrey. On July 22, 1886, he married the sister-in-law of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Alice Thacher. They had two daughters.

In 1883 Channing received a prize of $150 for his work "Town and County Government in the English Colonies of North America". This monograph also brought him the membership in the Massachusetts Historical Society and was the basis of the first paper given at the first meeting of the American Historical Association in 1884 in Saratoga, N.Y.

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