John William Burgess was one of the leaders in the professionalization of American social science. As an administrator, he was a pioneer in the establishment of graduate education in the United States. As a teacher, he counted among his former students many of the nation's academic elite. Other students, the most famous being Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, went on to gain prominence in the law, journalism, business, or public life. More than any other person, he laid the basis for the acceptance of political science as a scholarly discipline in the United States. He was regarded by contemporaries as the dean of comparative and American constitutional law studies. And he was a leading practitioner--though with his own distinctive neo-Hegelian twist--of "scientific history."

Burgess was born on 26 August 1844 in Giles County, in middle Tennessee adjacent to the Alabama border. He was of New England stock on his...