In a memorial poem written in the year John Lothrop Motley died, William Cullen Bryant said of the New England Brahmin, diplomat, and historian: "thy glorious writings speak for thee / And in the answering heart of millions raise / The generous zeal for Right and Liberty." For forty years Motley had upheld in his writings the artist's responsibility to advance democracy. In the historical narratives that earned him fame in America and Europe, Motley found in the past a pattern of Protestants repeatedly liberating themselves from repression and facilitating global social progress.

The second of Thomas and Anna Lothrop Motley's eight children, John Lothrop Motley was born on 15 April 1814 in the Boston suburb of Dorchester, where his father and his uncle Edward Motley had begun their prosperous commercial partnership in 1802. He began his education at Charles W. Green's school in Jamaica Plain the summer after his tenth birthday. In...