Charles McLean Andrews

Born: Wethersfield; February 22, 1863
Died: New Haven; September 9, 1943

Charles M. Andrews was one of the most distinguished historians of his time, generally recognized as the master of American colonial history. A graduate of Trinity College in Hartford (1884) and a Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. (1889), Andrews taught at Bryn Mawr College and at Johns Hopkins before serving as Farnham Professor at Yale from 1910 until his retirement in 1931. He received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1935 and in 1937 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was awarded the gold medal, given only once every ten years, by the National Institute of Arts and Letters for outstanding work in history. He received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Lehigh. When he received the Harvard degree, on the occasion of Harvard's tercentenary celebration, Andrews was cited as "a great teacher and scholar, foremost among the living historians of America." Between 1888 and 1937, he was the author of more than one hundred books, articles, essays, and published addresses and estimated that in addition he had written some 360 book reviews, newspaper articles, and short notes.

Having a Connecticut ancestry of seven generations and describing himself as "a Puritan of the Puritans," Andrews not surprisingly was deeply interested in American colonial history and the early history of Connecticut. His first book was The River Towns of Connecticut (Baltimore, 1889), a study of the settlement of Wethersfield, Hartford, and Windsor.

Yet, Andrews did not devote himself to a glorification of early New England. He observed, for example, that Puritan ideas "regarding the political and religious organization of society [were] far removed from the democratic ideas of later times." Nor was Andrews a spokesman for an "uncritical Americanism" in charting the history of the American Colonies. Rather, Andrews, along with Herbert L. Osgood (1855-1918) of Columbia University, forged a new approach to American colonial history-the so-called "imperial" interpretation. Andrews believed that previous colonial historians had emphasized the colonies without sufficient attention to the imperial ties with Great Britain. In such works as The Colonial Period (New York, 1912), Andrews accordingly gave as much attention to England as to America. The interpretation of the coming of the American Revolution in Andrews was not an account of conscious British tyranny, a view characteristic of too many American historians before Andrews. According to Andrews, the Anglo-American clash was inevitable because the British statesmen of the era could not overcome the limitations of their society in order to relate to the dynamic society evolving in America. The essence of the Andrews approach to the Anglo-American worlds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can best be examined in The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (New Haven, 1924) and in his masterpiece, the four-volume Colonial Period of American History (New Haven, 1934-1937).

Writing at a time when the United States was reluctantly coming to play a decisive role in world affairs, Andrews reflected a historical sophistication useful to the education of his countrymen. In 1924 he wrote:

A nation's attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul and the men and women of such a nation cannot be expected to meet the great obligations of the present if they refuse to exhibit honesty, charity, open-mindedness, and a free and growing intelligence toward the past that has made them what they are.

For Further Reading

Eisenatadt, Abraham S. Charles McLean Andrews. New York, 1956.

Labaree, Leonard W. "Charles McLean Andrews: Historian, 1863-1943." The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, I (January 1944, 3-14).

Entry by David M. Roth.

* Record under revision.