William R. Shepherd

William Robert Shepherd (12 June 1871 in Charleston, South Carolina – 7 June 1934 in Berlin, Germany) was an American cartographer and historian specializing in American and Latin American history.

In 1896, Shepherd completed his PhD at Columbia University. He then studied in Berlin and finally became professor of history at Columbia University. He is best known for his Historical Atlas, published in several editions during the early twentieth century. He is considered a pioneer in the field of Latin American history. Shepherd's address to the 1909 meeting of the American Historical Association was "probably the first time that a part of the program of the annual meeting was devoted to the history of other peoples in the Americas." In his remarks, he decried that in the United States the history of the western hemisphere focuses on the English colonies and ignores or disparages the history of Spanish, Portuguese, and French America. He called for a more balanced history of the Americas, stressing "That the history of the Spanish, Portuguese, and the French in America possesses an interest and a significance of its own, entirely apart from its relation to the "Anglo-American" element."

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