The American historian Herbert Levi Osgood (1855-1918) was a leading authority on colonial history in America, especially the origin and development of English-American political institutions.

Herbert Levi Osgood was born on April 9, 1855, in Canton, Maine. He studied at Amherst, and after he graduated he taught for 2 years at Worcester Academy in Massachusetts. He then went on to graduate school at Yale and in 1882-1883 studied in Berlin under Heinrich von Treitschke and consulted frequently with Leopold von Ranke. In general, Osgood adopted Ranke's view of history. Ranke's goal was to reconstruct historical events "as they actually were," avoiding subjective interpretations and moralistic judgments.

Osgood taught at Brooklyn High School from 1883 to 1889, also pursuing his doctorate at Columbia College's faculty of political science, where he received his degree in 1889. Shortly thereafter he decided to concentrate on the political history of the English colonies in America. This area of interest...