Abstract
Annie Heloise Abel (18731947) was one of only thirty American women to earn
a PhD in history prior to the First World War. She was the first academically
trained historian in the United States to consider the development of Indianwhite
relations and, although her focus was narrowly political and her methodology
almost entirely archival-based, in this she was a pioneer. Raised in the bucolic
atmosphere of a late-Victorian Sussex village, at the age of twelve she became an actual pioneer when her parents moved to the Kansas frontier in the 1880s. She was the third
child and eldest daughter among seven remarkable siblings, children of a Scottish
gardener, each of whom obtained a college education and fulfilled the American
dream of financial stability and status.
Annie Abels academic career was one of rare success for a woman of the
period and she studied at Kansas, Cornell, Yale, and Johns Hopkins universities.
She was the first woman to win a Bulkley scholarship to Yale, where her doctoral
thesis won her an American Historical Association award and was published in its
annual report. As well as college teaching, for a short time she was historian at the
Office (now Bureau) of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, and was also involved
in womens suffrage issues. She reached the peak of her academic teaching career
as a history professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the countrys
most prestigious womens institutions of higher learning.
She combined her teaching with research and wrote some minor pieces prior
to her major work, a three-volume political history of the Indian Territory during
the American Civil War, which was published between 1915 and 1925. Her life
took an unexpected turn while on a research sabbatical in Australia when, aged
nearly fifty, she found romance and then experienced a disastrous, short-lived
marriage. Undeterred, she returned to America and continued to pursue her
primary professional interest as an independent researcher, winning grants that
took her to England and Canada, until her retirement to Aberdeen, Washington, in
the 1930s. During this latter period of her life Annie Abel-Henderson (as she now
styled herself) produced no original works but continued to publish editions of
historically important manuscripts, work she had begun early in her career. Her
research interests also covered early North American exploration narratives and,
as an extension of her work on Indianwhite relations, she had planned an
ambitious, comparative study of United States and British Dominion policy
towards colonised peoples. As a reviewer, her historical expertise was long sought
by the leading academic history journals of the day. Before her death at seventy four
from carcinoma, her final years were busy with war relief work and
occasional writing.
No full-length work has yet appeared on this pioneer historian and this
dissertation seeks to evaluate Annie Heloise Abels work by a close reading of her
textual legacyoriginal, editorial and commentarialand to assess her
importance in American historiography.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216370 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Anderson, James Stephen, jim.anderson@flinders.edu.au |
| Publisher | Flinders University. History |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.flinders.edu.au/disclaimer/), Copyright James Stephen Anderson |
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