Charles McLean Andrews
Charles McLean Andrews (1863-1943) was an influential American historian known for his contributions to the study of colonial American history. Born into a family with deep New England roots, he pursued his education at Trinity College and later earned a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, where he worked under the notable historian Herbert Baxter Adams. Andrews played a significant role in shaping the "imperial school" of historiography, which emphasized the importance of British colonial history in understanding American development. His notable works include "Colonial Self-Government" and "The Colonial Background of the American Revolution," which had a lasting impact on the field.
Throughout his career, he held prestigious academic positions at Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins, and Yale University, where he taught and mentored future historians. Andrews was also recognized for his practical guides to British archival sources, aiding historians in their research. Despite his achievements and the accolades he received, including a Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, his ideas faced challenges from emerging historical schools of thought. Andrews's commitment to rigorous analysis of primary sources set a high standard for historical scholarship in the United States.
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Charles McLean Andrews
Historian
- Born: February 22, 1863
- Birthplace: Wethersfield, Connecticut
- Died: September 9, 1943
- Place of death: East Dover, Vermont
Biography
Charles McLean Andrews was born in 1863 to Elizabeth Byrne Williams and William Watson Andrews, a minister in the Catholic Apostolic Church. The Andrews family had deep New England roots that went back to 1638. Charles was educated locally and earned his A.B. from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He served as principal at West Hartford High School for two years until his aunt provided funding for graduate study at the recently opened Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Andrews chose history as his discipline and worked under pioneering scholar Herbert Baxter Adams, who had imported the German seminar system for graduate study and research. The two men formed a close working relationship, and Baxter oversaw Andrews’s doctoral thesis, The River Towns of Connecticut, which appeared in Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, a review Adams founded and edited. Andrews was awarded his doctorate in 1889, at which time he began teaching at Bryn Mawr College. Over the next few years he wrote a two-volume textbook on modern Europe, a textbook on English history, and a popular history of contemporary Africa, Asia, and Europe. On June 19, 1895, Andrews married Evangeline Walker, with whom he would have a son and a daughter.
Andrews took his first trip to England in 1893. The trip opened his eyes to English archival records and the importance of British colonial history to American colonial development, the focus of his own scholarship. In a paper presented before the American Historical Association in 1898, Andrews emphasized the need to understand the broader British context of American colonial history. He sparked what subsequently has been labeled the “imperial school,” an interpretive framework that influenced a generation of historians. In 1904 Andrews published his first major work in colonial history, Colonial Self- Government, which was reprinted as late as 1969. He also began to publish his guides to British archival sources for American historians. These highly practical handbooks remained highly useful for decades and aided generations of historians.
In 1906 Johns Hopkins offered Andrews the chair in history and political science that Adams had occupied, and Andrews held this position for three years. Yale University offered Andrews the Farnham Professorship in 1910, and, in 1912, editorship of the new Yale Historical Series of monographs (patterned on Hopkins’s series), a position he held until 1933. At both Hopkins and Yale, Andrews taught graduate students who were preparing to become professional historians. He was active in the profession and served as president of the American Historical Society for the 1924-1925 term.
His own principal work in the “imperial school” was The Colonial Background of the American Revolution, which went through fifteen printings. After retiring from Yale in 1931, Andrews wrote his greatest work, the four-volume Colonial Period of American History. Though he won a Gold Medal for history and biography from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1937, a new and antagonistic school of historians was developing and challenging his ideas. With his emphasis on the use of primary sources and their rigorous treatment, Andrews set a high standard for historical writing in America.