"I was wound up by my mother to work," wrote Hubert Howe Bancroft in his autobiography, Literary Industries (1890), which chronicles his progress from bookseller to book collector, from amateur historian to producer-publisher of the mammoth history California (1884-1890). Published in seven hefty tomes and backed up by thirty-eight volumes of regional histories--some found in multi-volume editions of their own--it covers the territories of Central America, Mexico, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and Utah and the Rocky Mountain states. To support his research, Bancroft gathered together, for over twenty-five years, a collection of sixty thousand books and manuscripts--the foundation for the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Hubert Howe Bancroft was born in Granville, Ohio, on 5 May 1832 to Azariah Ashley and Lucy Howe Bancroft. His father was an abolitionist farmer, and his mother was a schoolteacher; they raised him in accordance with a belief in hard...