Background
Julian Parks Boyd was born on November 3, 1903, in the rural town of Converse, South Carolina. He was one of three children of Robert Jay Boyd, a railroad telegrapher, and Melona Parks.
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Julian Parks Boyd was born on November 3, 1903, in the rural town of Converse, South Carolina. He was one of three children of Robert Jay Boyd, a railroad telegrapher, and Melona Parks.
After dropping out of high school during his freshman year and working as an assistant bank cashier in a small South Carolina town, Boyd graduated in 1921 from Baird's Preparatory School in Charlotte, North Carolina. He attended Duke University, graduating summa cum laude in 1925 and earning a master's degree in political science a year later.
After college, Boyd moved north, working for a year as an instructor in American history at the University of Pennsylvania, the only college teaching position he ever held. In 1928, Boyd became editor of The Susquehanna Company Papers for the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
During the next four years, Boyd earned his historical spurs by producing the first four volumes of this series, a meticulously edited collection of documents dealing with the much-disputed efforts of an eighteenth-century Connecticut land company to settle the Susquehanna Valley, and by publishing a number of essays on the subject.
In 1932, Boyd was appointed a director of the New York State Historical Association at Ticonderoga. During his two-year tenure, Boyd established a quarterly bulletin, in which he called for microfilming critically important privately owned collections of historical manuscripts before they were offered for sale at auction and for surveying college and university archives to facilitate the work of historical researchers. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania appointed Boyd its librarian in 1934.
Indian Treaties, Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736-1762 (1938), launched what became a useful guide to the society's holdings, and published a monograph, Anglo-American Union: Joseph Galloway's Plans to Preserve the British Empire, 1774-1788 (1941).
In 1940, he became librarian of Princeton University. In addition to discharging the manifold duties of a university librarian, Boyd continued to produce a steady stream of articles and book reviews dealing with various subjects in early American history, as well as two short books: The Declaration of Independence (1943) and The Scheide Library (1947).
Boyd continued to serve concurrently as librarian of Princeton until 1952 when he resigned this position to devote himself wholly to editing the Jefferson papers. Boyd's editorship of the Jefferson papers falls into two clearly defined phases.
During the first fifteen years of the project, with the help of an efficient editorial staff and by keeping his historical commentary on the documents at a moderate length, Boyd produced fifteen volumes covering Jefferson's career through the end of his ministry to France in 1789. These volumes revolutionized the art of historical editing in the United States and earned Boyd virtually universal praise for his masterly handling of what one reviewer called "one of the greatest editorial and publishing ventures in the nation's history. "
It was largely on the basis of this accomplishment that Boyd served as president of the American Historical Association in 1964 and as president of the American Philosophical Society from 1973 to 1976. During the last twenty-one years of Boyd's tenure as editor, however, production of the Jefferson papers slackened and his approach began to draw criticism.
Beginning with the papers relating to Jefferson's term as secretary of state, Boyd radically increased the scale of his historical commentaries on the documents, convinced that the great struggle between Jeffersonian republicanism and Hamiltonian centralism required an unprecedented level of analysis by a historical editor.
But even as Boyd broadened his editorial scope, financial constraints forced him to reduce his staff, while a series of prolonged illnesses and advancing age began to sap his once formidable energies.
As a result, Boyd produced only five more volumes of the Jefferson papers before his death, which led a growing number of critics to call for him to concentrate on editing the texts with a minimum of scholarly commentary.
Nevertheless, the twenty volumes of the Jefferson papers Boyd published remain as monuments of historical editing, though he fell far short of his goal of completing the project in fifty-two volumes in thirteen years. Boyd collapsed while working at home on an editorial note to the Jefferson papers, and died of a combination of cancer and cardiac failure at Princeton Medical Center.
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Boyd's concern about improving the professional standards of the guardians of America's documentary heritage led him to become an early advocate of what later became the Society of American Archivists.
Conceived of by Boyd during his tenure in 1943 as a historian of the Thomas Jefferson Bicentennial Commission, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1950-) was a scholarly response to the inadequacies of existing editions of Jefferson's papers and an ideological response to the challenge of totalitarianism to liberal democratic values.
Boyd persuaded the federally appointed commission that a definitive edition of Jefferson's papers would, in the context of World War II, be the most fitting way to commemorate the historical legacy of the foremost symbol of American democracy.
With the approval of the commission, the sponsorship of Princeton University and Princeton University Press, and the financial assistance of Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times Company, Boyd assumed editorship in 1944 of an ambitious enterprise that was dedicated to the publication in thirteen years of fifty-two volumes that would account in one way or another for the approximately forty-five thousand surviving papers written and received by Jefferson.
Julian P. Boyd was a member of of the American Historical Association and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
On December 21, 1927, Julian Parks Boyd married Grace Wiggins Welch of Edenton, North Carolina, and shortly thereafter, left the Methodist church to which generations of his ancestors belonged. They had two sons, one of whom drowned at an early age in an ice-skating accident.