Charles gibson historian biography sample
Charles Hammond Gibson Jr. (1874-1954)
Author, Poet, & Preservationist
Charles "Charlie" Hammond Gibson Jr. was born into the wealth and social decorum of Boston's Back Bay during the Victorian era, an environment he idolized and later worked to preserve with the establishment of the Gibson House Museum.
He received his early education at private schools in Boston, attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and briefly studied architecture at MIT before withdrawing after a year. He furthered his education through travels to Italy, France, and England. In London, he assisted the prominent newspaper publisher Lord Northcliffe with the Jackson-Harmsworth Polar Exposition of 1894. As Northcliffe's secretary, Gibson conducted research at the British Museum and in France, which he used for his book "Two Gentlemen of Touraine," a study of the Royal Chateaux of France published under the pseudonym Richard Sudbury in 1899. He later published "Among French Inns" in 1907 under his own name.
In his teens and early twenties, Gibson was part of a "bohemian" subculture, a term often signaling queer communities centered around artistic pursuits like architecture, writing, and interior design. His contemporaries included Ogden Codman and Henry Davis Sleeper. Although Gibson never married nor had a long-term partner, he maintained a close, romantic relationship with Maurice Talvande, the Count de Mauny, during his twenties in France.
Gibson had a lifelong passion for poetry and writing, publishing his first poem, a sonnet, in the Boston Transcript in 1894. He continued to write prolifically, with the museum’s archives containing his poetry, travel lectures, odes to dignitaries, a family genealogy, and even song lyrics. After the relative success of his travelogues, Gibson self-published two volumes of poetry, including "The Wounded Eros" (1908), a collection of sonnets about unfulfilled love. He offered lectures on travel and history and p
Galileo Before the Dreaded Inquisition
In the preceding chapter we have seen how Galileo came to invent the telescope, and now we wish to see how it was that his telescope set him on the road which led ultimately to the Holy Inquisition.
The greatest of Galileo's telescopic discoveries was his detection of four small planets circling around that gigantic planet which we call Jupiter. Imagine the feelings of Galileo! No man had ever beheld such a scene before; he was "infinitely amazed thereat." But Galileo was humbled; he gave thanks to God, who had been pleased to make him the first observer of marvellous things, unrevealed to bygone ages.
The Grand Duke of Tuscany became so interested in the discovery of Jupiter's satellites that Galileo determined to call them by the Grand Duke's family name—Medici—and so these planets were christened the Medicean Stars. Not long after this Galileo was invited to become Mathematician and Philosopher to the Court of Tuscany at Florence. This was a post that he had desired, because it would give him time to make further investigations.
The interest in Galileo's new stars was not merely local. The Court of France was quite excited about the matter. The French Queen was one of the Medici family; she had married King Henry IV of France. We are told that when a telescope from Galileo arrived at the Palace, the Queen was so eager to see the moon's appearance through the telescope that she did not wait for the instrument to be placed in position, "but went down upon her knees before the window, thereby greatly astonishing the Italian gentlemen who had brought the telescope into the Royal presence."
We learn from a letter of Galileo's to the private secretary of the Duke of Tuscany, that the French Court had been very anxious that Galileo should name some heavenly body after their King. Galileo did not make this fact known until after the assassination of Henry IV, and his reason for quoting from the letter The objective of this study is to provide a background for an evaluation of the contribution of Charles Dana Gibson to the history of American art as well as to the social history of America through the medium of graphic art. The paper gives an account of Gibson's work from the sale of his first drawing in 1886, to 1905 when he interrupted a busy career as the highest paid artist-illustrator in the country in order to travel to Europe to study painting. Through a chronological arrangement of his drawings, the remarkable breadth of his stylistic evolution is analyzed; first in the light of contemporary European trends in the fine arts, and later in that of the social realist movement in the United States. An attempt is made to isolate artistic influences evidenced in his art, as well as to document his own significant influence on other artists. In each period of Gibson's career, the social phenomena with which he was concerned is examined so as to illuminate his important role as social historian. The impact of Gibson's visual imagery made him a powerful influence upon his times, and his formulation of an American ideal of womanhood, together with the significance of his role in her “emancipation,” is projected in a separate chapter on the Gibson Girl. There is also a brief analysis of his oils in an effort to place him in the most appropriate art historical niche (American Impressionism), and some examples of his paintings are shown. The appendixes contain a brief biographical sketch, a list of books written and/or illustrated by Gibson, and a selection of drawings with the original publication sources (either album or major periodical) provided for the majority of the 150 plates included. Conquest, Capitulation, and Indian Treaties From Perspectives, October 1985 Charles Gibson (August 12, 1920–August 22, 1985), after a long illness, died on August 22, 1985 in Plattsburg, New York, not far from the summer home of his boyhood on Lake Champlain. A distinguished scholar of Latin American history, who was President of the American Historical Association in 1977, his writing and teaching did much to shape a whole field of study. He wrote with elegant precision and economy, using meticulous scholarship to address questions of large significance. In such early work as The Inca Concept of Sovereignty and the Spanish Administration of Peru (Austin, 1948) and Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, 1952; second edition, Stanford, 1967) he expanded a framework taken from institutional history to incorporate culture as a whole, and the clash of civilizations became the central theme of The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, a History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, 1964). He saw no conflict, however, between such broad vision and the precise historical investigation to which he remained committed, a dedication that led to extensive and influential work as a bibliographer (including The Colonial Period in Latin American History, published by the Service Center for Teachers of History of the AHA, 1948, and revised edition, 1970; Guide to the Hispanic American Historical Review, 1946–1955, published with E.V. Niemeyer, 1958; his contributions to the Handbook of Latin American Studies, 1952–70; his contributions to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, 1958–75; his contributions to Latin America, a Guide to the Historical Literature, 1971, and his chapter in The Past Before Us, edited by Michael Kammen, 1980, and his part in the publication of numerous volumes of documents (of which The Spanish Tradition in A Charles Dana Gibson : a study of an artist as social historian
Charles Gibson
Presidential Address
In Memoriam