Lawrence Gipson

Background

Gipson was born on December 7, 1880 in Greeley, Colorado, to Albert Eugene Gipson and Lina Maria W. He grew up in Caldwell, Idaho, where his father was a newspaper editor.

Education

After attending public schools in Caldwell, Gipson enrolled at the University of Idaho, where he studied for a career in journalism and competed in intercollegiate athletics as a distance runner. Upon receiving the B. A. degree in 1903, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a second B. A. degree in 1907. He received his Ph. D. degree in 1918. His thesis was published by Yale University Press in 1920 as Jared Ingersoll: A Study of American Loyalism in Relation to British Colonial Government, a volume that won the American Historical Association's Justin Winsor Prize.

Career

Gipson returned to the United States in 1907 and taught history for three years at the College of Idaho. In 1910 he was appointed to the history faculty of Wabash College in Indiana, where he remained until 1924. He took a leave of absence in 1917 to return to Yale to complete his Ph. D. degree. As student at Oxford Gipson had begun to question the Whig interpretation of the American Revolution that blamed King George III and his Tory associates for the rupture. He was receptive to the revisionist "Imperial" school of colonial history led by Andrews, who called for a more objective assessment of the Crown, Parliament, Ministry, and even Loyalists in the quarrel. A strong believer in the new "scientific" history, which focused on patterns and forces in history rather than on people, Andrews expected his students to study institutional and administrative history. If Gipson, in choosing to do a biographical study of Ingersoll, went against his mentor's advice, he did not ignore his historiographical point of view. Jared Ingersoll differed from typical patriotic studies in its sympathetic treatment of a Loyalist torn between conflicting loyalties to the Crown and to his native Connecticut. From this volume Gipson progressed to more ambitious studies that in time made him the foremost of the Imperial historians. In 1924 Gipson moved to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he served as head of the history department until 1946, when he became research professor. Afterward he concentrated most of his efforts on completing the project he launched when he first came to Lehigh. The support he received from Lehigh during his forty-eight-year association with that institution enabled him to produce his magnum opus, The British Empire Before the American Revolution. Publication began in 1936 with the appearance of the first three volumes. Unable during the Great Depression to find a New York publisher, Gipson turned to Caxton Printers, a family enterprise, to issue these initial volumes, which Knopf later reissued with revisions and in a format consistent with the other volumes in the series. During the next thirty-four years Gipson worked steadily to bring out twelve more volumes. No other historian of the Imperial school of colonial history rivals Gipson for comprehensiveness. In his volumes Gipson described in considerable detail the political, economic, and military aspects of the British empire in the mideighteenth century. He was sympathetic to its imperial administrators, and he defended mercantilism because he thought it benefited all parties. Although Gipson was loath to permit anything to divert him from his work on The British Empire Before the American Revolution, he did accept the Harmsworth Chair in American History at Oxford University in 1951. He also wrote a volume for the New American Nation Series, which was published in 1954 as The Coming of the Revolution, 1763-1775. That volume did not measure up to his best work, and certainly not to the seventh volume of his series, The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758-1760, The Triumphant Empire: Thunder Clouds Gather in the West, 1763-1766. The author of more than 150 books, articles, and reviews, he was faulted by some critics for writing history from a Tory point of view and for a turgid prose style, but few historians can match the depth of Gipson's understanding of colonial American history. He died in his sleep on September 26, 1971, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; his ashes were buried in Caldwell. He left his entire estate to Lehigh University, providing the core funding for the Gipson Institute

Achievements

Gipson is best known for his fifteen-volume history of "The British Empire Before the American Revolution", published 1936-1970. He was also leader of the "Imperial school" of historians who studied the British Empire from the perspective of London, and generally praised the administrative efficiency and political fairness of the Empire.