a compendium of facts about Ohio history
by Dan Chabek
James Ford Rhodes
One northern Ohioan of the last century gained notable acclaim as a writer of American history.
He was James Ford Rhodes, who retired from business in 1885 to produce an impressive nine-volume history of the United States.
It covered events starting from the Great Compromise of 1850 and continuing through the Theodore Roosevelt administration.
Rhodes was born in 1848, in Cleveland, where today a high school is named after him. He was a descendant of a New England family that had migrated to the Western Reserve.
After academic studies in this country and abroad, he joined his father, Daniel P. Rhodes, in the coal and iron industry in Cleveland, where in 1874 he was made a partner in the firm of Rhodes & Co.
However, in 1885, he opted to leave business to devote his energies to historical research and writing. Later he moved from Ohio to Massachusetts. There he eventually became president of the American Historical Association. He died in Brookline, Mass., in 1927 at age 78.
© 1998 Dan Chabek
History of the Civil War, 1861-1865 by James Ford Rhodes - Bartleby
John Singer Sargent's James Ford Rhodes
James Ford Rhodes - Encyclopedia of Cleveland History