Author: Goldwin Smith

Smith held the Regius chair of modern history at Oxford, taught at Cornell, and then settled in Toronto, where he became one of the loudest public voices in Canada, funded institutions and argued that the country should join the United States. He supported the North in the American Civil War and the letter here is that argument, written at the Southern lobby in Britain. He also spent decades publishing the view that Jews were a nation inside other nations and could not be assimilated, which was contested at the time and is not a modern reinterpretation of him. The Jane Austen life and the Shakespeare essays are the literary side of a very large output. He left money to Cornell and died in Toronto in 1910.