The American School Library
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The American School Library
The American School Library was a set of books published by Harper & Brothers in 1838 and 1839 on behalf of the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The Society was incorporated in the State of New York on May 16, 1837 at the urging of the Reverend Gorham D. Abbott. The American Society, and its Library, were inspired by "A Library of Useful Knowledge", a set of educational pamphlets published in England in the late 1820s by the UK's Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The fifty books in the set included volumes on American, Egyptian and Chinese history, biographies of George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte, the principles of physiology and health, and the novel ''The Swiss Family Robinson.'' The set of 50 books was priced twenty dollars, with the cost of providing a set to the nation's fifty thousand school districts set at one million dollars. In 1839, New York State passed a law mandating that every school district in the state would buy a set of ...
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Harper & Brothers
Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins based in New York City. History J. & J. Harper (1817–1833) James Harper and his brother John, printers by training, started their book publishing business J. & J. Harper in New York City in 1817. Their two brothers, Joseph Wesley and Fletcher, joined them in the mid-1820s. Harper & Brothers (1833–1962) The company changed its name to "Harper & Brothers" in 1833. The headquarters of the publishing house were located at 331 Pearl Street, facing Franklin Square in Lower Manhattan (about where the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge lies today). Harper & Brothers began publishing ''Harper's New Monthly Magazine'' in New York City in 1850. The brothers also published ''Harper's Weekly'' (starting in New York City in June 1857), '' Harper's Bazar'' (starting in New York City in November 2, 1867), and ''Harper's Young People'' (starting in New York City in 1879). George B. M ...
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John Francis Davis
Sir John Francis Davis, 1st Baronet (16 July 179513 November 1890) was a British diplomat and sinologist who served as second Governor of Hong Kong from 1844 to 1848. Davis was the first President of Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong. Background Davis was the eldest son of East India Company director and amateur artist Samuel Davis while his mother was Henrietta Boileau, member of a refugee French noble family who had come to England in the early eighteenth century from Languedoc in the south of France. Career In 1813, Davis was appointed writer at the East India Company's factory in Canton (now Guangzhou), China, at the time the centre of trade with China. Having demonstrated the depth of his learning in the Chinese language in his translation of ''The Three Dedicated Rooms'' ("San-Yu-Low") in 1815, he was chosen to accompany Lord Amherst on his embassy to Peking in 1816. On the mission's return Davis returned to his duties at the Canton factory, and was promoted to pre ...
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James Wilson (Founding Father)
James Wilson (September 14, 1742 – August 21, 1798) was a Scottish-born American Founding Father, legal scholar, jurist and statesman who served as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1789 to 1798. Wilson was elected twice to the Continental Congress, was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, and was a major participant in drafting the U.S. Constitution. A leading legal theorist, he was one of the first four Associate Justices appointed to the Supreme Court by George Washington. In his capacity as the first professor of law at the College of Philadelphia (later to become the University of Pennsylvania), he taught the first course on the new Constitution to President Washington and his Cabinet in 1789 and 1790. Born near Leven, Fife, Scotland, Wilson emigrated to Philadelphia in 1766 and became a teacher at the College of Philadelphia. After studying law under John Dickinson, he was admitted to the bar and set up legal practice in Reading, Pen ...
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James Kirke Paulding
James Kirke Paulding (August 22, 1778 – April 6, 1860) was an American writer and, for a time, the United States Secretary of the Navy. Paulding's early writings were satirical and violently anti-British, as shown in ''The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan'' (1812). He wrote numerous long poems and serious histories. Among his novels are ''Konigsmarke, the Long Finne'' (1823) and ''The Dutchman's Fireside'' (1831). He is best known for creating the inimitable Nimrod Wildfire, the “half horse, half alligator” in The Lion of the West (1831), and as collaborator with William Irving and Washington Irving in ''Salmagundi.'' (1807–08). Paulding was also, by the mid-1830s, an ardent and outspoken defender of slavery, and he later endorsed southern secession from the union. Biography James Kirke Paulding was born on August 22, 1778, at Pleasant Valley, Dutchess County, New York. His parents were William Paulding and Catherine Ogden. Paulding was chiefly self-edu ...
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John Gibson Lockhart
John Gibson Lockhart (12 June 1794 – 25 November 1854) was a Scottish writer and editor. He is best known as the author of the seminal, and much-admired, seven-volume biography of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott: ''Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart'' Early years Lockhart was born on 12 June 1794 in the manse of Cambusnethan House in Lanarkshire to Dr John Lockhart, who transferred in 1796 to Glasgow, and was appointed minister in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and his second wife Elizabeth Gibson (1767–1834), daughter of Margaret Mary Pringle and Reverend John Gibson, minister of St Cuthbert's, Edinburgh. He was the younger paternal half-brother of the politician William Lockhart. Lockhart attended Glasgow High School, where he showed himself clever rather than industrious. He fell into ill-health, and had to be removed from school before he was 12; but on his recovery he was sent at this early age to the University of Glasgow, and displayed so much ...
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Robert Jameson
Robert Jameson Robert Jameson FRS FRSE (11 July 1774 – 19 April 1854) was a Scottish naturalist and mineralogist. As Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh for fifty years, developing his predecessor John Walker's concepts based on mineralogy into geological theories of Neptunism which held sway into the 1830s. Jameson is notable for his advanced scholarship, and his museum collection. The minerals and fossils collection of the Museum of Edinburgh University became one of the largest in Europe during Jameson's long tenure at the university. Early life Jameson was born in Leith on 11 July 1774, the son of Catherine Paton (1750–94) and Thomas Jameson (c.1750–1802), a soap manufacturer on Rotten Row (now Water Street). They lived on Sherrif Brae. His early education was spent at Leith Grammar School, after which he became the apprentice of the Leith surgeon John Cheyne (father of John Cheyne), with the aim of going to sea. He also atte ...
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Anna Jameson
Anna Brownell Jameson (17 May 179417 March 1860) was an Anglo-Irish art historian. Born in Ireland, she migrated to England at the age of four, becoming a well-known British writer and contributor to nineteenth-century thought on a range of subjects including early feminism, art history (particularly sacred art), travel, Shakespeare, poets, and German culture. Jameson was connected to some of the most prominent names of the period including Fanny Kemble, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and Robert Browning, Harriet Martineau, Ottilie von Goethe (the daughter-in-law of Goethe), Lady Byron, Charles and Elizabeth Eastlake, and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Biography Anna Murphy was born in Dublin, 17 May 1794. Her father, Denis Brownell Murphy (died 1842), was a miniaturist and enamel painter. He moved to England in 1798 with his wife Johanna and four daughters (of whom Anna was the eldest) and eventually settled at Hanwell, London. At sixteen years of age, she became governess in t ...
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George Payne Rainsford James
George Payne Rainsford James (9 August 1799 – 9 June 1860), was an English novelist and historical writer, the son of a physician in London. He was for many years British Consul at various places in the United States and on the Continent. He held the honorary office of British Historiographer Royal during the last years of William IV's reign. Early life George Payne Rainsford James was born in St George Street, Hanover Square, London in 1799. His father was a physician who had served in the navy and was in America during the Revolutionary War, serving with Benedict Arnold in the Battle of Groton Heights.At the Library Table, Adrian Hoffman Joline, Richard Badger, Boston, 1910. George attended the school of the Reverend William Carmalt in Putney. He developed a love of languages, including Greek, Latin, Persian and Arabic. He also studied medicine as a young man, but his inclinations led him in a different direction. He wanted to go into the navy, but his father was agai ...
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Barbara Hofland
Barbara Hofland (1770 – 4 November 1844) was an English writer of some 66 didactic, moral stories for children, and of schoolbooks and poetry. She was asked by John Soane to write a description of his still extant museum in London's Lincoln's Inn Fields. Life Born Barbara Wreaks or Wreakes, her father Robert Wreakes was a Sheffield manufacturer, but he died when she was three and she was raised by a maiden aunt. She began writing for the local paper and started a milliner's shop, but she sold it when she married the businessman Thomas Bradshawe Hoole in 1796, only to be widowed two years later with an infant son.Dennis Butts: The role of women writers in early children's literature. In: ''Aspects and Issues in the History of Children's Literature'', ed. Maria Nikolajeva (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1995). She went to live with her mother-in-law in Attercliffe, and supported herself partly from generous subscriptions given for a book of her poetry. In 1809 she opened ...
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Francis L
Francis may refer to: People *Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State and Bishop of Rome * Francis (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters *Francis (surname) Places * Rural Municipality of Francis No. 127, Saskatchewan, Canada * Francis, Saskatchewan, Canada **Francis (electoral district) * Francis, Nebraska *Francis Township, Holt County, Nebraska * Francis, Oklahoma *Francis, Utah Other uses * ''Francis'' (film), the first of a series of comedies featuring Francis the Talking Mule, voiced by Chill Wills *''Francis'', a 1983 play by Julian Mitchell * FRANCIS, a bibliographic database * ''Francis'' (1793), a colonial schooner in Australia * Francis turbine, a type of water turbine * Francis (band), a Sweden-based folk band * Francis, a character played by YouTuber Boogie2988 See also * Saint Francis (other) * Francies, a surname, including a list of people with the name * Francisco (disambiguation ...
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Leonhard Euler
Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in many other branches of mathematics such as analytic number theory, complex analysis, and infinitesimal calculus. He introduced much of modern mathematical terminology and notation, including the notion of a mathematical function. He is also known for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, astronomy and music theory. Euler is held to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history and the greatest of the 18th century. A statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace expresses Euler's influence on mathematics: "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all." Carl Friedrich Gauss remarked: "The study of Euler's works will remain the best school for the different fields of mathematics, and nothing else can replace it." Euler is a ...
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William Dunlap
William Dunlap (February 19, 1766 – September 28, 1839) was a pioneer of American theater. He was a producer, playwright, and actor, as well as a historian. He managed two of New York City's earliest and most prominent theaters, the John Street Theatre (from 1796–98) and the Park Theatre (from 1798–1805). He was also an artist, despite losing an eye in childhood. He was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, the son of an army officer wounded at the Battle of Quebec in 1759. In 1783, he painted a portrait of George Washington, while staying at Rockingham in Rocky Hill. The painting is now owned by the United States Senate. He later studied art under Benjamin West in London. Another teacher was Abraham Delanoy, with whom he had a handful of lessons in New York. After returning to America in 1787, he worked exclusively in the theater for 18 years, resuming painting out of economic necessity in 1805. By 1817, he was a full-time painter. In his lifetime he produced more than s ...
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