Background
Howard was born at Saratoga, New York in 1849. He was the son of Isaac and Margaret (Hardin) Howard.
Howard was born at Saratoga, New York in 1849. He was the son of Isaac and Margaret (Hardin) Howard.
Desire for a higher education led him to the State Normal School at Peru, where he was graduated in 1870. The University of Nebraska, which opened the doors of its single building in 1871, next attracted him, and he received his degree (A. B. ) there in 1876, being a member of the second class to complete a full four-year course. Following his graduation he went to Europe to study. He passed two years abroad, mainly in Munich and Paris, as a student of history and Roman law.
He went to Nebraska in a "covered wagon" in 1868, only a year after the admission of the state to the Union, and for a time lived the life of a pioneer in what was then the Great West.
Upon his return to the United States after the educational priod in Europe he became the first professor of history in the University of Nebraska. In spite of a heavy teaching schedule and most inadequate facilities, he found it possible to combine research with instruction. The result was the publication in 1889, as one of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (Extra Volume IV), of his monograph, An Introduction to the Local Constitutional History of the United States. It is a substantial, scholarly work, dealing with the development of the township, hundred, and shire. A companion volume on municipal institutions, though projected and partly written, never appeared.
In 1890 he published a valuable study, "On the Development of the King's Peace and the English Local Peace-Magistracy" (University Studies of the University of Nebraska). The reputation which he had now acquired brought him notable recognition in 1891, when President David Starr Jordan chose him to be one of the fifteen professors who formed the original faculty of Stanford University. There he remained for almost a decade, organizing, as at Nebraska, a strong department of history. As a lecturer he had great gifts, and students accustomed to consider history the dullest of subjects went away from his classroom filled with enthusiasm for the past as he revealed it.
His career at Stanford ended abruptly in 1901, when he resigned from the faculty in protest against the dismissal of Prof. Edward A. Ross. Howard felt very deeply that academic freedom had been imperiled at Stanford; he publicly criticized the University management before his classes; and, upon being required either to apologize for his action or to sever his connection with the institution, he resigned forthwith. This meant laying down a life position and sacrificing material welfare to what he regarded as justice and right. Nevertheless, he never showed in later years the least sign of regretting his bold action.
Howard now engaged for several years mainly in research and writing, and in 1904 published a monumental History of Matrimonial Institutions Chiefly in England and the United States. This three-volume work gave to him at once an international reputation as a student of institutions, one whose point of view was no longer narrowly national but comprehended the wide realms of anthropology and sociology. His Preliminaries of the American Revolution, a volume in the American Nation series, appeared in 1905. After some service as professorial lecturer in history at the University of Chicago, he returned to the University of Nebraska in 1904 as professor of institutional history, and from 1906 as head of the newly organized department of political science and sociology. Once more he had an opportunity to build academic foundations and direct the course of a young and growing department. He did not retire altogether from teaching until 1924, at which time he presented to the University a large library of history and social science.
Howard's work as teacher and investigator was inspired by a consuming zeal for social betterment. Such causes as race equality, woman's suffrage, child labor, prohibition, and international peace had in him a sturdy public champion. An idealist and a democrat, as well as a scientist, he always emphasized the contributions which sociology, as it developed, might make to human welfare.
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He was one of the founders, and served for several years as the secretary, of the State Historical Society. The presidency of the American Sociological Society (1917) and an honorary vice-presidency of the Institut International de Sociologie testified to the esteem in which he was held by his colleagues both at home and abroad.
Howard married, January 1, 1880, a classmate, Alice May Frost, of Lincoln, Nebr. They had no children.
