Jared Sparks (1789-1866), American editor, Unitarian minister, and historian, pioneered in publishing the source documents of American history.

Jared Sparks was born on May 10, 1789, on an impoverished farm in Willington, Conn. He graduated from Harvard in 1815, studied theology at the Harvard Divinity School, and was briefly a magazine editor. He was a Unitarian minister from 1819 to 1829, when he bought the North American Review and became its editor.

In the summer of 1823 he wrote in his diary, "Meditating on the importance of having a new history of America." The next year he began preparing an edition of George Washington's writings. His great ambition was to write the full history of the American Revolution. He gathered materials for this theme in archives of the original 13 states and in Europe.

Sparks published a series of volumes, beginning with the Life and Travels of John Ledyard (1828), concerning the famous traveler from Connecticut...