Charles McLean Andrews

Charles McLean Andrews became a leading American historian of the colonial period through sustained archival research. Educated at Trinity College and Johns Hopkins University, he taught at Bryn Mawr and Johns Hopkins before joining Yale, where he served as professor of American history from 1910 until 1931. The Fathers of New England, issued in 1919 within the Chronicles of America series, surveys the formation of the Puritan commonwealths and the political, religious, and institutional choices that shaped early New England. Its broad narrative reflects Andrews’s larger interest in colonies as parts of an imperial administrative system rather than isolated national beginnings. He later received the 1935 Pulitzer Prize in History for the first volume of The Colonial Period of American History and served as president of the American Historical Association. The Fathers of New England is more concise than his major documentary studies, but it translates the same concern with institutions, governance, and historical evidence into a narrative intended for general readers.