James Ford Rhodes

James Ford Rhodes built his reputation as a historian through a multivolume account of American life from the Compromise of 1850 through the nineteenth century. After building a business career in Cleveland, he turned to historical writing and later worked in Boston near major libraries. Commemorative Tribute to Barrett Wendell reveals another side of his literary activity. The American Academy of Arts and Letters preserves the piece as Rhodes's tribute to Wendell, the Harvard teacher, critic, and scholar who died in 1921. Rhodes considers Wendell's final book, The Traditions of European Literature, alongside his writing about Shakespeare, French society, James Russell Lowell, and the practice of teaching literature. The tribute is therefore both memorial and critical portrait. It records how one established historian assessed a contemporary scholar's reading, conversation, teaching, and cultural judgment, while also preserving the Academy's tradition of members remembering colleagues through substantial written addresses.