As a professor at Columbia University and a writer of American history, Herbert Levi Osgood helped to accomplish and then to exemplify a quiet but profound revolution in the American historical profession. Osgood realized as a youth that he was destined for historical scholarship. He proceeded through secondary, undergraduate, and graduate education almost uninterruptedly and then found a professorship and a scholarly home at a major university. This pattern has become familiar to subsequent generations of historians but was markedly different from the eclectic educations and varied livelihoods of many of Osgood's nineteenth-century predecessors. Early in his career Osgood struck upon his primary field of research. With few diversions he devoted a thirty-year career to an exhaustive study of British political and imperial institutions in colonial North America from the first British settlements in 1578 to the treaties of Paris and Hubertusberg in 1763. Osgood's three-volume The American Colonies in...