Frances Sergeant Childs (April 17, 1901 – June 11, 1988)''The American Catholic Who's Who: 1960 and 1961'', vol. 14, p. 66. was an American historian who was a founding faculty member of

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

. Her area of specialization was Franco-American relations in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Biography

Childs was born in New York City to Frances Aimee (La Farge) Childs and Edward Herrick Childs. Her maternal grandfather was the painter

John La Farge John La Farge (March 31, 1835 – November 14, 1910) was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics. La Farge is best known for ...

. She attended

Chapin School Chapin School is an all-girls independent day school in New York City's Upper East Side neighborhood in Manhattan. History Maria Bowen Chapin opened "Miss Chapin's School for Girls and Kindergarten for Boys and Girls" in 1901. The school origin ...

and then got her undergraduate degree from

Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr College ( ; Welsh: ) is a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Founded as a Quaker institution in 1885, Bryn Mawr is one of the Seven Sister colleges, a group of elite, historically women's colleges in the United St ...

(1923) and her master's (1927) and doctoral (1939) degrees from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

."In Memoriam, November 1988"
American Historical Association website. Retrieved October 29, 2016. Childs began her career in education as an instructor in history at

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...

(1928–30). In 1930, Childs was a founding faculty member of

, where she taught history for many years, beginning as an instructor and rising to full professor. As an historian, Childs specialized in Franco-American relations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her major book is the much-cited survey ''French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790-1800: An American Chapter of the French Revolution'' (1940).Fisher, Josephine. "Book Reviews". ''The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography'' 65:2 (April 1941), 250. Childs retired in 1963 and died in Bridgeport, Connecticut."Frances Sergeant Childs, Professor, 87"
''New York Times'', June 16, 1988.

Books

*''French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790-1800: An American Chapter of the French Revolution'' (1940) *''Fontaine Leval, a French Settlement on the Maine coast, 1791: A French Manuscript in the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, with an Introduction and Notes by Frances Sergeant Childs (1942) *''French Opinion of Anglo-American Relations: 1795-1805'' (1948) *''Citizen Hauterive's "Questions on the United States"'' (1957) *''France in New York, 1795-1850'' (1957)

References

American women historians Brooklyn College faculty Columbia University alumni Bryn Mawr College alumni Hunter College faculty 1901 births 1988 deaths Chapin School (Manhattan) alumni Historians from New York (state) 20th-century American women 20th-century American people {{US-historian-stub