Charles A. Beard: A Tribute

Charles and Mary wrote The Beards' New Basic History of the United States. It was the book my High School history teacher, who did not lie to me, chose…your feckless youth…Ming
Also read the annotated footnotes.

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Charles A. Beard was born on 27 November 1874 in Knightstown, Indiana, a small farming community about 35 miles east of Indianapolis. He was the son of a prosperous farmer, and a member of a family in which the intelligent discussion of public affairs was a tradition. When only eighteen years old, Beard's father bought and presented to him the town newspaper, the weekly Knightstown Sun, which he and his brother ran for the next four years. Following this experience, Beard enrolled in DePauw College (now University), in Greencastle, about 35 to 40 miles southwest of Indianapolis, an environment similar to the one Beard had been born in. Though Beard was for 50 years identified with sophisticated urban settings as a university professor and public figure here and abroad, and was to be a familiar presence in the nation's capital, his ties were always strong with the rural, agricultural world. It was no accident that he spent the last decades of his life as the resident on and proprietor of a working dairy farm in the small western Connecticut town of New Milford.

Beard graduated from DePauw in 1898, and thereafter for a few years divided his time between graduate study at Columbia University in New York and special study at Oxford in England, where he spent about two years.[1] It was while he was still in England that Beard's first book, a study of the Industrial Revolution, was published in 1901, a work which was to be reprinted at least ten times during his career.

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