James Ford Rhodes

James Ford Rhodes (born May 1, 1848, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died Jan. 22, 1927, Brookline, Mass.) was an American businessman and historian, best known for his multivolume investigation of the antebellum, American Civil War, and Reconstruction periods of the United States’ history.

Although he was educated at both New York University (1865–66) and the University of Chicago (1866–67), Rhodes never earned a degree. In 1867 he left college and went to Europe, living in Paris for a time before studying metallurgy in Berlin.

Upon his return to Cleveland, Rhodes in 1874 entered the coal and steel business with his brother and his brother-in-law (Marcus A. Hanna). Rhodes & Company prospered through the marketing and transportation of coal and iron, and by 1885 James Ford Rhodes had acquired a fortune sufficient for him to retire.

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For the rest of his life, Rhodes devoted himself to the study of American history. During the mid-1880s he wrote many articles and reviews for the Magazine of Western History and began the monumental project upon which rests his reputation as a historian—the History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. The seven volumes of this work appeared between 1893 and 1906 and were held in high esteem as “scientific” (i.e., objective and detached) historical scholarship. His insistence upon slavery as the cause of the war and his racist interpretation of Reconstruction have since been disputed, however.

Rhodes moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1891 and then on to Boston in 1895. He received honorary degrees from Oxford, Harvard, and Yale universities and in 1898 was elected president of the American Historical Association. He continued to write historical works until 1922. His History of the Civil War, 1861–1865 (1917) won the Pulitzer Prize.