Background

Frank Alfred Golder was born on August 11, 1877, near Odessa in southern Russia. In 1880, his parents, Joseph and Minnie Golder, emigrated to the United States and settled in Bridgeton, New Jersey.

Education

After attending the public schools of Bridgeton and Georgetown College in Kentucky, Golder entered Bucknell University, from which he was graduated in 1898.

The next year, he went to Alaska where he spent three years on a lonely island settlement as a United States commissioner and teacher in a government school. These years among Aleuts and half-breed fishermen had an important effect upon his career.

He became greatly interested in the country and in the Aleuts and their myths, many of which he collected and subsequently published, and he returned to the United States with a determination to write the history of Alaska. In the pursuit of this aim, he entered Harvard College where he received the B. A. degree in 1903.

In the graduate school, he continued his researches in Alaskan history which eventually took him to the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Archives de la Marine in Paris and gave him his doctorate in These studies changed his point of view in respect to Alaskan history and diverted his historical interests from research in the American field to that of Russia.

Career

In 1914, after further researches in St. Petersburg, Golder published Russian Expansion on the Pacific 1641-1850, a work which was promptly recognized in America and Europe as one of the most valuable studies of Russian activities in the Pacific.

Meanwhile, beginning in 1908, he had held teaching appointments at the University of Missouri, Boston University, the University of Chicago, and the State College of Washington. In 1914, the Carnegie Institution selected Golder to investigate the sources for the study of American history in the Russian archives.

The results of this investigation he published in his Guide to Materials for American History in Russian Archives (1917), and in a number of papers on Russian-American relations in the American Historical Review.

At this time also, he secured an important collection of unpublished letters of John Paul Jones which in 1927, he brought out under the title John Paul Jones in Russia. The continuance of his studies in Russia was made temporarily impossible by war conditions and early in 1913, he returned to the United States to the history faculty of the State College of Washington, where he had held an appointment since 1910.

In January 1917, he sailed from Seattle for Russia to undertake further investigations in the archives under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution and the American Geographical Society.

He reached Petrograd in time to witness the exciting scenes of the March Revolution, and he remained in Russia during that eventful summer watching and recording in his diary the rising tide of revolution which culminated in the Bolshevik coup d’etat of November 7.

At the request of the American ambassador, he went to Vladivostok to accompany the Stevens Railway Commission across Siberia and on its tours of inspection in European Russia.

Despite these semi-official duties, he found time to work in the archives and to make a further valuable contribution to the history of the North Pacific in his edition of papers relating to Bering’s explorations published under the title Bering’s Voyages, Golder left Russia a few weeks before the Bolshevik uprising, returning to the United States where, a few months later, he joined Col. House’s Inquiry Commission as a specialist on Russian affairs.

In 1920, he returned to eastern Europe to collect materials for the newly established Hoover War Library at Stanford University, and the following year he joined the history faculty at Stanford but remained in Europe as a member of Hoover’s American Relief Administration.

During the great Russian famine, he rendered invaluable service as an official of the relief organization; hundreds of Russian scholars owed their lives to his untiring labor.

On the withdrawal of the commission from Russia, Golder returned to Stanford where he was appointed a director of the Hoover War Library and professor of history, and where he was engaged in research on the Russian Revolution at the time of his death.

Achievements

• Golder is best remembered for his work in the early 1920s building the seminal collection of Slavic language materials residing today at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University in California.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Russian Expansion on the Pacific, 1641-1850: An Account of the Earliest and Later Expeditions, Made by the Russians Along the Pacific, Coast of Asia ... to the Arctic Regions (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Russian Expansion on the Pacific, 1641-1850:...)

  • Russian expansion on the Pacific, 1641-1850; an account of the earliest and later expeditions made by the Russians along the Pacific coast of Asia and ... related expeditions to the Arctic regions

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Bering's Voyages: The Log Books and Official Reports of the First and Second Expeditions, 1725-1730 and 1733-1742

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

  • Documents of Russian History 1914 1917

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • THE MARCH OF THE MORMON BATTALION from Council Bluffs to California. Taken from the Journal of Henry Standage.

    (Blue hardcover; no jacket issued; first edition mormon mo...)

Connections

Golder never married

Father:

Joseph Golder

Mother:

Minnie Golder