Stephen Bartow Baxter (March 8, 1929 − September 15, 2020) was an American historian specialising in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century English history. He was educated at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

and

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

before working at

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

and the

University of Missouri The University of Missouri (Mizzou, MU, or Missouri) is a public land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus University of Missouri System. MU was founded in ...

. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959-1960 for which he spent seven years researching his biography of

William III of England William III (William Henry; ; 4 November 16508 March 1702), also widely known as William of Orange, was the sovereign Prince of Orange from birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic f ...

. His biography of William III remains the standard scholarly study, and projects a highly favorable view of the king Of England, 1689-1702: :William III was the Deliverer of England from the tyranny and arbitrary government of the Stuarts....He repaired and improved an obsolete system of government, and left it strong enough to withstand the stresses of the next century virtually unchanged. The army of Marlborough, and that of Wellington, and to a large extent that of Raglan, was the creation of William III. So too was the independence of the judiciary.....

is government In linguistics, a copula (plural: copulas or copulae; abbreviated ) is a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word ''is'' in the sentence "The sky is blue" or the phrase ''was not being'' i ...

was very expensive; at their peak the annual expenditures of William III were four times as large as those of James II. This new scale of government was bitterly unpopular. But the new taxes, which were not in fact heavy by comparison with those borne by the Dutch, made England a great power. And they contributed to the prosperity of the country while they contributed to its strength, by the process which is now called 'pump-priming.'

Works

*''The Development of the Treasury, 1660-1702'' (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957). *''William III and the Defense of European Liberty, 1650-1702'' (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966). *''England's Rise to Greatness, 1660-1763'' (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).

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at the University of North Carolina 1929 births 2020 deaths Historians of England Harvard University alumni Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Dartmouth College faculty University of Missouri faculty University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty American expatriates in the United Kingdom 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers American male non-fiction writers {{US-historian-stub