Hubert Howe Bancroft

Early life Hubert Howe Bancroft was born on May 5, 1832, in Granville, Ohio, to Azariah Ashley Bancroft and Lucy Howe Bancroft. The Howe and Bancroft families originally hailed from the New England states of Vermont and Massachusetts, respectively. Bancroft's parents were staunch abolitionists and the family home was a station on the Underground Railroad. Bancroft attended the Doane Academy in Granville for a year, and he then became a clerk in his brother-in-law's bookstore in Buffalo, New York. Move to California In March 1852, Bancroft was provided with an inventory of books to sell and was sent to the booming California city of San Francisco to set up a West Coast regional office of the firm. Bancroft's library consisted of books, maps, and printed and manuscript documents, including a large number of narratives dictated to Bancroft or his assistants by pioneers, settlers, and statesmen. The indexing of the vast collection employed six persons for ten years. The library was moved in 1881 to a fireproof building and, in 1900, numbered about 45,000 volumes. He was also elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1875. Death He died on March 2, 1918, at his country home in Walnut Creek, California. "Acute peritonitis" was blamed as the cause of death in published newspaper reports. Bancroft was 85 at his death. His body was interred in the Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. ==Writing and views==

Bancroft often published writing by others under his own name, fitting others' writing into a narrative of history as Bancroft saw it. This "literary factory" style of production resulted in writing of uneven quality. By modern standards Bancroft would not be considered the author of many of the works he attributed to himself; he often failed to give adequate credit to the contributing writers. Bancroft's staff copied and summarized material in archives throughout California and the Southwest, and collected oral histories. The result was 39 volumes of history attributed to Bancroft. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo served as Bancroft's contact among the Californios. Based on interviews, Vallejo produced a five-volume work of history for Bancroft. Vallejo was disappointed by how Bancroft used the work, subsuming the stories of Mexicans into a master narrative organized around the Gold Rush. Bancroft tried to purchase the writing of historian Antonio María Osio, who refused to sell so that Bancroft could not credit himself as the author of her work. Conflicting views Bancroft's personal views appear conflicted and are difficult to know exactly because he published writing by others under his own name. According to the Bancroft Library: Bancroft's writing expressed support for vigilance committees in the West. Bancroft celebrated "the honor of the first popular tribunal of the placer mining epoch" in Hangtown, a place named for its many vigilante lynchings. ==Legacy==

In the late 19th century, it was determined that much of the work of which Bancroft claimed authorship had in fact been written by others. This tainted his legacy in the eyes of some scholars, on the principle "false in one thing, false in all." The Salt Lake Tribune called him a "purloiner of other peoples' brains" in 1893. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, reflects the collector's name. The University of California purchased his 60,000-volume book collection in 1905. In 1885 Bancroft purchased a ranch with an adobe cottage located in Spring Valley, in San Diego County, as a retirement home. The Hubert H. Bancroft Ranch House is now a National Historic Landmark. In addition, part of a property Bancroft bought around 1880 in Contra Costa County, California, later became the Ruth Bancroft Garden, when three acres of the remaining farm land was given by Bancroft's grandson Philip to his wife, Ruth Bancroft. Several schools are named for Bancroft, including Bancroft Middle School (Long Beach, California), Bancroft Middle School (Los Angeles, California), Hubert H. Bancroft Elementary School in Sacramento, California, Bancroft Middle School in San Leandro, California, Bancroft Elementary School in Walnut Creek, California, and Bancroft Community School in Spring Valley, California. Contrary to some sources, including Bancroft's own obituary, An archive of Bancroft family correspondence, collected by his daughter Kate, is held in Special Collections and Archives at Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego. Recollections of Hubert Howe Bancroft and the Bancroft Family, an oral history interview with Margaret Wood Bancroft, widow of Bancroft's son Griffing, is held in the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. ==Published works==

Bancroft's written works include the following, with the 39-volume set of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft (pub. 1874–1890): • • • • (Remains and Ruins) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • (the Gold Rush years) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • This volume gives an account of his methods of work. • The Early American Chroniclers (1883) • Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth: Historical Character Study (1891–1892) • Book of the Fair (1893) • Resources and Development of Mexico (1893) • The Book of Wealth (1896) • {{cite book • Retrospection, Political and Personal (1912, 1915) • Why a World Centre of Industry at San Francisco Bay (1916) • In These Latter Days (1917) Note on production methods Bancroft made use of index cards in the organization and compilation of facts for his lengthy and massive series of historical volumes. Neither Bancroft, nor most of his assistants, had enough training to avoid stating their personal opinions and enthusiasms, but their works were generally well received in their time. Historian Francis Parkman praised Bancroft's The Native Races in The North American Review. Lewis Henry Morgan's essay, "Montezuma's Dinner," rebuts Lewis Henry Morgan's ideas about gradations of civilization. In turn, Morgan's essay was based on Friedrich Engels' "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan." Bancroft critiqued Morgan's understanding of stages of civilization and savagery. Both Morgan's and Engels' ideas are most certainly antiquated and reveal a profound and mechanistic understanding of human development. ==Footnotes==