Background

Benjamin Franklin Shambaugh was born on January 29, 1871, in a farmers' family near Elvira, Clinton County, Iowa, United States.

Education

The Shambaughs valued education and gave generously to the country school their children attended, but only the two youngest, George and Benjamin, received family support for a college education.

After attending the Iowa City Academy for two years to prepare for college, Benjamin Shambaugh entered the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa) in 1888. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1892, then continued at the UI with graduate studies in history. During that time, he began mining the collections of the State Historical Society of Iowa. From Iowa, Benjamin Shambaugh embarked on doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a Doctor of Philosophy in political science in 1895.

Career

Benjamin Shambaugh before he graduated from Penn, the University of Iowa offered him a position teaching history and political science. He accepted, then went to Germany to pursue postdoctoral studies before taking his post in January 1896.

The university hired Benjamin Shambaugh to be the founding chair of a new Department of Political Science. In addition to taking up that charge, he began forging a productive partnership between the University of Iowa and the Historical Society of Iowa, which at that time legally fell under the university’s jurisdiction. As a member of the Historical Society of Iowa's Board of Curators, Benjamin Shambaugh voluntarily assumed the duties of editor and set scholarly standards for the society’s publications. When the University of Iowa embarked on constructing a new liberal arts building (Schaeffer Hall), he negotiated space for the Historical Society of Iowa across the hall from the Political Science Department. Then, in 1907, the Historical Society of Iowa established the Office of Superintendent and Editor and unanimously elected Benjamin Shambaugh to the position. From 1907 to 1940 he managed the Department of Political Science from one side of the hall and Historical Society of Iowa from the other.

As Historical Society of Iowa Superintendent, Benjamin Shambaugh turned a typical antiquarian society into one of the leading state historical organizations in the country. In 1903, before he had a formal title of leadership, he launched the Iowa Journal of History and Politics, a scholarly journal that became a vehicle for publishing policy studies and substantive digests of state legislation. Benjamin Shambaugh also began programs of editing and publishing important state government documents (Public Archives Series, 1897-1906) and biographies of important people in Iowa’s history (Biographical Series, 1907-1939).

In 1910, after failing in an attempt to create a legislative research bureau in the state capital, Benjamin Shambaugh took a bold step that strengthened the tie between the Historical Society of Iowa and the Department of Political Science: he established a research group, informally known as the School of Iowa Research Historians, to investigate a wide variety of topical issues in state and local history for the purpose of helping state lawmakers and civic leaders solve contemporary political, social, and economic problems. In 1910 he coined the term "applied history" to describe this mission. A long string of monographs flowed from his vision of applied history.

ShaBenjamin Shambaugh's boughs another major initiative was the Commonwealth Conference. Conceived as "a school for leaders in citizen training and citizenship committee work," each conference was actually a civic forum that addressed a specific issue of governance. Invited speakers, often nationally known figures, stimulated discussion and debate with an audience drawn from state and local political officeholders, judges and attorneys, public school administrators and teachers, college and university faculty, representatives from major statewide organizations, and University of Iowa students. Budget cutbacks in the 1930s impeded his ability to continue the Commonwealth Conference and other applied history initiatives. Federal dollars available through various New Deal programs opened up new opportunities but also unharnessed the energies of his staff. As a result, Benjamin Shambaugh began to refocus on teaching.

By 1930 the Political Science Department had grown to a faculty of eight, some of whom published research monographs under Historical Society of Iowa auspices. Many of the department’s graduate students and alumni constituted the ad hoc School of Iowa Research Historians, and a few of them secured full-time research staff positions at the Historical Society of Iowa or faculty positions in the Political Science Department. Several theses and dissertations were published in the volumes of the Applied History Series. Benjamin Shambaugh promoted the study of state and local problems among his faculty and students, an emphasis reflected in the curriculum, which balanced political theory with courses in state and local government.

But around 1930 he began to withdraw from the powerhouse partnership that had been the focus of his career for three decades. Benjamin Shambaugh turned his attention to developing the Campus Course, an educational experiment that proved to be successful beyond measure. Through a combination of wide-ranging lectures, facilitated small-group discussion sessions, and one-on-one conversations with his students, Benjamin Shambaugh coached them to synthesize the knowledge and experience each had gained at the University of Iowa before stepping out into the wider world.

Shambaugh’s contributions to the professional organizations of history and political science were no less impressive. Benjamin Shambaugh was a founding member of the American Political Science Association, served as its president in 1930, and co-founded its scholarly journal, the American Political Science Review. He also was a founding member of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (now Organization of American Historians), edited its Proceedings (1909-1914), and served as its president (1909- 1910).

Works

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  • History of the Constitutions of Iowa
  • The Cardiff Giant Deception
  • Iowa Manual of Legislative Procedure
  • Fragments of the Debates of the Iowa Constitutional Conventions

Connections

In 1897 Benjamin Shambaugh married Bertha M. Horack, his college sweetheart. The couple had no children, but their home was always a social center for Shambaughs students and colleagues.

Spouse:

Bertha Maude Shambaugh

References

• Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History Although his name is little known today outside Iowa, during the early part of the twentieth century Benjamin Shambaugh (1871-1940) was a key figure in the historical profession. Using his distinguished career as a lens, Conard's seminal work is the first book to consider public history as an integral part of the intellectual development of the historical profession as a whole in the United States. Conard draws upon an unpublished, mid-1940s biography by research historian Jacob Swisher to trace the forces that shaped Shambaugh's early years, his administration of the State Historical Society of Iowa, his development of applied history and commonwealth history in the 1910s and 1920s, and the transformations in his thinking and career during the 1930s.
  2001
• Hudson, D., Bergman, M., & Horton, L. (Eds.) The biographical dictionary of Iowa
  2009