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= William_Stearns_Davis =
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Introduction
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Portrait of William Stearns Davis.
William Stearns Davis (April 30, 1877 - February 15, 1930) was an
American educator, historian, and author. He has been cited as one who
"contributed to history as a scholarly discipline, . . . [but] was
intrigued by the human side of history, which, at the time, was
neglected by the discipline." After first experimenting with short
stories, he turned while still a college undergraduate to longer forms
to relate, from an involved (fictional) character's view, a number of
critical turns of history. This faculty for humanizing, even
dramatizing, history characterized Davis' later academic and
professional writings as well, making them particularly suitable for
secondary and higher education during the first half of the twentieth
century in a field which, according to one editor, had "lost the
freshness and robustness . . . the congeniality" that should mark the
study of history. Both Davis' fiction and non-fiction are found in
public and academic libraries today.
Life
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Davis was born April 30, 1877, in the presidential mansion of Amherst
College, Amherst, Massachusetts, where his mother's father had been
president for the twenty-two years preceding his birth. His father
was Congregational minister William Vail Wilson Davis; his mother
Francis Stearns. Due both to childhood illnesses and to family moves
occasioned by his father's call to new congregations, Davis was
largely educated at home until he entered Worcester Academy in 1895.
In 1897 he matriculated at Harvard. Fascinated by maps and by
historical figures, he had begun writing stories for himself while
still at home. He now turned this experience and his desire to
humanize history to writing historical novels, the first of which, 'A
Friend of Caesar', was published in the year he graduated as a member
of Phi Beta Kappa. He continued at Harvard, being the first
first-year graduate student to receive the Harvard Thayer Graduate
Scholarship, and earning his A.M. in 1901 and his PhD in 1905. During
these same years he continued publishing historical fiction.
In 1904, Davis began his formal teaching career, beginning as a
lecturer at Radcliffe College while finishing his doctorate. He
continued thereafter at Beloit College (instructor, 1906-07), Oberlin
College (assistant professor of medieval and modern european history,
1907-1909), and finally at the University of Minnesota (professor of
history, 1909-1927). "He was an excellent teacher with the ability to
put life into his lectures." His steady output of non-fiction in both
history and the historical background to contemporary world affairs
began with his time at Minnesota. Professionally, he was a member of
the American Historical Association.
In 1911, he married Alice Williams Redfield of Minneapolis. He
retired from teaching in 1927, moving back to New England and taking
up residence in Exeter, New Hampshire, with the intention of devoting
all of his time to writing. However, he died of pneumonia following
an operation at the age of 52 on February 15, 1930.
Fiction
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Davis' books are characterized by his desire to tell a story. For his
historical fiction, he chose subjects with dramatic flavor, such as
the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, the coming to power of Julius
Caesar, Leo the Isaurian's defense of Constantinople, the beginning of
the Protestant Reformation, and the start of the American Revolution.
Stylistically, they use narrative of the kind which Josephine Tey
called "history-with-conversation", and his earliest novels have some
of the attributes of scholarly publication, including meticulous (and
copious) footnotes or appendices. Indeed, a reviewer of a later
fictional work noted that previously "Mr. Davis has erred in
overabundance of detail. Knowing much is sometimes more troublesome
than knowing little, and Mr. Davis's knowledge has in times past
seemed too large for his story. In 'Falaise,' however, this fault is
to a most felicitous degree overcome . . . ." The 'American National
Biography' noted that his fictional works "were not classics, . . .
but they were accurate and maintained an interesting story line." He
himself would become deeply involved in such writings, to the point of
depression when one was finished.
*'A Friend of Caesar: A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic'
(1900).
*'"God Wills It!": A Tale of the First Crusade' (1901)
*'Belshazzar: A Tale of the Fall of Babylon' (1902)
*'The Saint of the Dragon's Dale: A Fantastic Tale' (1903)
*'A Victor of Salamis: A Tale of the Days of Xerxes, Leonidas, and
Themistocles' (1907)
*'The Friar of Wittenberg' (1912)
*'The Beauty of the Purple: A Romance of Imperial Constantinople
Twelve Centuries Ago' (1924)
*'Falaise of the Blessed Voice' (1904), republished as 'The White
Queen' (1925)
*'Gilman of Redford: A Story of Boston & Harvard College on the
Eve of the Revolutionary War, 1770-1775' (1927)
*'The Whirlwind: An Historical Romance . . . of the French Revolution'
(1929)
Non-fiction
=============
In a similar manner, the elements of narrative and drama are part of
his non-fiction, much of which was written for teaching purposes. His
1910 work on wealth and money in first-century Rome begins with an
almost journalistic daily-weekly narrative of bank failures and
trading house suspensions leading to a financial panic in 33 AD (which
must have read all too familiarly to those who had just weathered the
1907 crash). The opening of 'The Roots of the War', perhaps his most
contemporaneously widely read nonfiction book, portrays Bismarck,
Moltke, and Roon at dinner in 1870, planning what would become the
Franco-Prussian War. Among his last works, 'Europe Since Waterloo'
(and all the revisions based upon it) begins with a narrative picture
of Napoleon on the deck of the British man-o'-war transporting him to
his final exile in St. Helena. Forty years later, Kurt Schmeller,
producing the latest revision of that work, would say that he "sought
to retain the powerful and dramatic narrative of earlier editions",
and Theodore H. Von Laue's foreword to the same edition would cite
Davis' "forceful, lively, and down-to-earth style" as a motive to
retain the core of a work then moving towards a half-century of use.
Davis' strong anti-German sentiment colored much of his later
non-fiction writing, particularly in his articles and letters to
various periodicals. He was a forceful advocate of military
preparedness in the years leading up to World War I, for which he was
duly criticized in the widely pacifistic feeling of the times (see for
example the 1916 exchange of letters in 'The Survey'). During World
War I, Davis and many other academic historians desired to support the
war but hesitated between a professionally ethical approach to history
and a firm belief in President Wilson's expressed ideals in advocating
American intervention in the War. Davis chose to participate in the
work of the government-sponsored Committee on Public Information
(CPI). Davis in particular provided historical background and context
to the Committee's pamphlet on Wilson's war message to Congress. For
this work, in the years following the War, he and the other
participants were criticized by some contemporaries belonging to the
"revisionist" historical school, such as Harry Elmer Barnes.
Succeeding next-generation scholars in the same tradition were equally
critical. A particularly outspoken critic, C. Hartley Gratton, said
of Davis' CPI efforts and of his 1918 'The Roots of the War' that
there was "free use of gossip, and the 'revelations' of the Creel
Bureau are accepted as definitive truth". Davis himself would write
in 1926 of the earlier work that "very little of [that] hastily
prepared material has endured under the cold scrutiny demanded by
added information and years of retrospect.". In view of Davis'
retirement and early death, what long-term effect such criticisms
might have had upon him is unknowable. Blakey sums up the
revisionists' efforts by saying that, however they changed the
practice of historical writing, "their impact on the subsequent lives
and careers of the embattled historians was slight to the point of
being negligible," and this could apply fairly to Davis.
*'Outline History of the Roman Empire (44 B.C. to 378 A.D.)' (1909)
*'The Influence of Wealth in Imperial Rome' (1910)
*'Readings in Ancient History.' Two volumes. 'Vol. I: Greece and the
East' (1912). 'Vol. II: Rome and the West' (1913)
*'A Day in Old Athens: A Picture of Athenian Life' (1914). This work
was recently adapted by Charles Douglas Smith and republished as 'Now
That You Asked: Ancient Athens' (2007)
*'A History of Mediaeval and Modern Europe for Secondary Schools'
(with Norman Shaw McKendrick) (1914)
*'The Roots of the War: A Non-technical History of Europe, 1870-1914,
A.D.' (with William Anderson and Mason W. Tyler) (1918), published in
the United Kingdom as 'Armed Peace' (1919)
*'A History of France from the Earliest Times to the Treaty of
Versailles' (1919)
*'A Short History of the Near East, from the Founding of
Constantinople (330, A.D. to 1922)' (1922)
*'Life on a Mediaeval Barony: A Picture of a Typical Feudal Community
in the Thirteenth Century' (1923)
*'A Day in Old Rome: A Picture of Roman Life' (1925)
*'Europe Since Waterloo' (1926). This work was revised and extended
four times by Walter Phelps Hall under the title 'The Course of Europe
Since Waterloo' (1941, 1947, 1951, 1957). A still later revision by
Kurt R. Schmeller was published as 'Hall & Davis' The Course of
Europe Since Waterloo' (1968).
*'The French Revolution as Told in Fiction' (1927)
*'Life in Elizabethan Days: A Picture of a Typical English Community
at the End of the Sixteenth Century' (posthumous, 1930)
Historical approach
=====================
Throughout his writing career, both of fiction and non-fiction, Davis'
"angle" to history, as he himself put it in his preface to 'Europe
Since Waterloo', included:
"a belief in a just form of 'nationalism', and that a devoted loyalty
to native land is entirely reconcilable with an ardent love for wide
humanity.
"an intense belief in 'democracy', . . . and that the modern age is
bound to resume the old, old battle against the vicious assumption
that some select group of men . . . is competent to decree the
destinies of an entire people.
"Finally, . . . a matured belief that only as 'the spirit of
Christianity' penetrates the hearts of men will human brotherhood and
wide-spread, enduring happiness be achieved . . . . If the so-called
Christian nations and rulers have all too often failed unworthily,
their failure has been because they knew not the essence of
Christianity, however eagerly they have usurped the name."
Stylistically, Davis never gave up on writing 'stories' as a medium to
convey his love for history as he saw it, and his intense conviction
that the knowledge of history should matter to his contemporaries. He
had a faculty for describing critical scenes, such as the expulsion of
the tribunes in 'A Friend of Caesar' or Luther before the Diet of
Worms in 'The Friar of Wittenberg'. In his day, he was known for his
"vivid, almost melodramatic prose style". 'Twentieth Century Authors'
would credit him with having welded "fact and fiction without loss of
narrative intensity or historical plausibility."
References
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*Adams, Oscar Faye. 'A Dictionary of American Authors.' 5th ed.,
rev. & enlarged. Boston: Houghton Mifflen, 1904. Rpt. Detroit:
Gale Research Co., 1969.
*'The American Historical Review' (abbreviated as 'AHR'). "Historical
News: Personal". Pub. American Historical Association. Vol. 35, No.
3 (Apr., 1930).
*Barnes, Harry Elmer. 'In Quest of Truth and Justice: De-Bunking the
War Guilt Myth.' Chicago: National Historical Society, 1928.
*Blakey, George T. 'Historians on the Homefront: American
Propagandists for the Great War.' Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky, 1970. .
*Committee on Public Information (abbreviated as CPI). 'The War
Message and the Facts Behind It: Annotated Text of President Wilson's
Message, April 2, 1917.' War Information Series No. 1 [No. 101 in
some listings]. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1917. Google
Book Search: [
https://books.google.com/books?id=Le0WAAAAYAAJ "The War
Message and the Facts Behind It"], accessed October 20, 2008.
*Davis, William Stearns. 'Europe Since Waterloo: A Non-technical
History of Europe from the Exile of Napoleon to the Treaty of
Versailles, 1815-1919.' New York: The Century Company, 1926.
*Davis, William Stearns, with William Anderson and Mason W. Tyler.
'The Roots of the War, A Non-technical History of Europe 1870-1914
A.D.' New York: The Century Company, 1918. Internet Archive:
[
https://archive.org/details/rootswaranontec01tylegoog "Roots of the
War"], accessed September 25, 2008.
*Gratton, C. Hartley. "The Historians Cut Loose." 'American Mercury'
11.44 (August 1927):414-430. Reprinted New York: Johnson Reprint Co.,
1968.
*Krosch, Penelope. "Davis, William Stearns." 'American National
Biography.' Vol. 6. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. .
*Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft. "Davis, William Stearns."
'Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern
Literature.' New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1942.
*Lawrence, Alberta, ed. 'Who's Who Among North American Authors.'
Vol IV (1929-30), Vol. V (1931-32). Los Angeles: Golden Syndicate
Publishing Co.
*MacDonald, Quentin. "Fiction that Many Will Read: Falaise of the
Blessed Voice". 'Book News, an Illustrated Magazine of Literature and
Books.' Philadelphia: John Wanamaker, publisher. Vol. 23, No. 267
(Nov 1904). Google Book Search:
[
https://books.google.com/books?id=qtsRAAAAYAAJ&dq=Falaise+of+the+Blessed+Voice&pg=PA196
"Falaise of the Blessed Voice"], accessed October 22, 2008.
*'The Nation'. "Current Fiction". Vol 95:2463 (September 12, 1912).
*Schmeller, Kurt R. 'Hall & Davis' The Course of Europe Since
Waterloo.' Foreword by Th. H. Von Laue. One volume (hardback); two
volumes (paperback). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968.
*Survey Associates. 'The Survey.' Vol. 35 (October 1915 - March
1916). Google Book Search,
[
https://books.google.com/books?id=RfsqAAAAMAAJ&dq=William+Stearns+Davis+intitle:Survey&pg=PA497
"William Stearns Davis"], accessed October 22, 2008.
*Tey, Josephine (Elizabeth MacKintosh). 'The Daughter of Time', 1951.
Rpt. in 'Four, Five, and Six by Tey'. New York: The MacMillan
Company, 1952.
* 'Who's Who in America'. Ed. Albert Nelson Marquis. vols. iii
(1903), xv (1928-29), xvi (1930-31).
* The Davis Papers are in the Archives of the University of Minnesota
Library, Collection Number
[
http://discover.lib.umn.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=umfa;cc=umfa;q1=DAvis%2C%20William%20Stearns;rgn=main;view=text;didno=uarc00702
UARC 702].
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