New Belknap Press Publishes Book By Six Harvard History Professors

"Harvard Guide to American History" will be the first publication of the recently established Belknap Press, a division of the Harvard University Press. The new enterprise was provided by the estate of the late Walter P. Belknap, Jr. '29. The press will publish books primarily within the field of American history.

The Harvard Guide is a reference book on historical materials from the discovery of America to 1950. It has been compiled by six members of the History Department, five of them Pulitzer Prize winners.

The authors are Oscar Handlin, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., Samuel E. Morison, Frederick Merk, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38, and Paul H. Buck, all professors of History.

Belknap, a Boston architect, was for many years a leading expert in the fields of colonial history, genealogy, and architecture, in early American portraiture and silver work. Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, has noted that Belknap's thinking and style "combined the standards of the past with a very acute perception of the present. He had a sure and enviable grasp of history." Weeks concluded.

Belknap, whose will provided for the new press, died in December 1949, He saw action in both world wars, and has been very active in the professions of banking and architecture. He received his M.A. in the latter field here in 1933.

The guidebook is a successor to two earlier University handbooks on American history. The first, published in 1896 by Albert Bushnell Hart and Edward Channing, covered the period 1492-1865. In 1912, Hart and Channing, with Frederick Jackson Turner, revised this work to 1910, under the title, "Guide to the Study and Teaching of American History."

The book contains 66 essays on the writing of history and the use of historical works for research. It also offers extensive lists of published material in all fields of American history.