J. Franklin Jameson, historian, teacher, editor, organizer, and collector, stood at the forefront of his profession in promoting sound historical scholarship. While he never produced a magnum opus, Jameson's career dramatically reflected a change, in the late nineteenth-century writers of history, from the predominance of gifted amateurs possessing wealth and leisure to the emergence of seminar-trained college professors viewing history as a science. Unlike his predecessors, who selected subjects for intrinsic dramatic and literary possibilities and who expected their works to achieve permanence, Jameson prided himself on tracing the evolution of American institutions and fully expected his works to be superseded. Using occasional flashes of dry humor, Jameson possessed a refined prose style, somewhat severe in its simplicity but always clear in conveying his thoughts. Jameson's highly developed critical judgment was revealed in a wide variety of writings: books about American colonial and revolutionary history and about American...