Mary Williams

Background

Williams was born on May 14, 1878, on a remote farm in Stanislaus County, California. Her mother, Caroline Madsen, was from Denmark and her father, Charles Williams, was born in Sweden.

Education

At the age of eighteen Williams attended San Jose State Normal School in California and graduated in 1901.

Career

She was on the board of editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review from 1927 to 1933 and was secretary of the Conference on Latin American History in 1928 and 1934. Williams is credited for starting the first collegiate course in Canadian history in the United States in 1916. She contributed to the Dictionary of American and wrote two books on Scandinavia.

Williams was an active feminist and pacifist.

Also, she was the editor of Equal Rights, an independent feminist weekly from 1935 to 1936. She was a teacher for three years before attending Stanford University, where she received her Master of Arts in 1908.

Williams went back to teaching from 1908 to 1911 while studying at the University of Chicago during the summers. She took a trip to London, England, in 1911 to research her doctoral dissertation at the Public Record Office.

Williams received her Doctor of Philosophy in 1914 and became an instructor in History at Stanford University.

From 1914 to 1915 Williams was an instructor in History at Wellesley College. Williams taught at Goucher College in Baltimore as a professor in 1920. From 1918 to 1919 Williams served the government of Honduras as a cartographic, geographic, and historical specialist in relation with its border disagreements with Guatemala and Nicaragua.

On behalf of the American Association of University Women, Williams traveled to fifteen Latin American countries to survey their higher education facilities for women in 1926.

The United States State Department appointed Williams to serve on a variety of committees dealing with Latin American problems. In 1940 she was presented with a decoration from the Dominican government in recognition of her work in promoting understanding between the two countries.

She remained a professor at Goucher College until 1940 when she retired to Palo Alto, California. Williams died suddenly from a stroke on March 10, 1944.

Her grave is marked "Teacher, Historian, Pacifist, Feminist."

As a teacher, Williams is remembered for her thorough standards of scholarship, her persistence for complete mastery of a subject matter, and her encouragement of students in undertaking independent research.

Achievements

• She was a member of the Women"s International League for Peace and Freedom and was founder of the California chapter of the National Woman"s Party in California. Her dissertation, Anglo-American Isthmian Diplomacy, 1815–1915, won the Justin Winsor Prize of the American Historical Association.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Social Scandinavia In The Viking Age (1920)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Social Scandinavia in the Viking Age (1920) (Paperback) - Common

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Anglo-American Isthmian Diplomacy, 1815-1915: -1916

    (Originally published in 1916. This volume from the Cornel...)

  • Anglo-American Isthmian diplomacy, 1815-1915 1916 Hardcover

    (Lang:- eng, Pages 376. Reprinted in 2016 with the help of...)

Connections

teachers:

Latin America