Wallace Notestein

Background

Wallace Notestein was born on December 16, 1878 in Wooster, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Jonas O. Notestein, a professor of Latin and literature, and Margaret Wallace.

Education

Educated at the preparatory department of the College of Wooster, where his father taught for more than fifty years, Notestein entered the college itself in 1896 and received his Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude four years later. Notestein pursued his graduate education at Yale, earning his Master of Arts in 1903 and Doctor of Philosophy in history in 1908. Notestein devoted his academic career to studying Elizabethan and Stuart England.

Career

Notestein demonstrated wide knowledge of his subject when he issued a volume of edited documents, Source Problems in English History, in 1915.

Notestein began his long teaching career as an assistant professor at the University of Kansas in 1905.

During World War I he left the classroom to serve as a research assistant for the Committee on Public Information. In this capacity he produced Conquest and Kultur: Aims of the Germans in Their Own Words (1917), a brochure that sought to discredit Prussian militarism and imperialism. He was later attached to the State Department and then the American Commission to Negotiate the Peace, doing special research on the tangled problem of Alsace-Lorraine for the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

In 1917 he became a full professor at the University of Minnesota. Three years later Notestein moved to Cornell, before becoming Sterling Professor of English History at Yale, where he remained from 1928 to 1947. Notestein made more than forty trips to England to consult original manuscripts not only in the major London depositories but also in rural parishes throughout the country. He taught his graduate students that a cache of unexplored documents was the "finest gold" a scholar could hope to discover.

Commons Debates for 1629 (1921) pieced together an account of debates derived from the letters and diaries of members of Parliament. Notestein edited rough notes taken by a member of the Long Parliament to produce The Journal of Sir Simonds D'Ewes (1923), a reconstruction of the proceedings of the House of Commons for 1640-1641. The following year, he presented the annual Sir Walter Raleigh lecture to the British Academy, the first American ever to do so. Published as "The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons, " this short essay closely analyzes a crucial episode in Parliamentary history preceding the English Civil War.

Notestein wrote English Folk: A Book of Characters (1938), a collection of vivid portraits of thirteen individuals who lived between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Scot in History (1946), a subject that deeply interested him because his mother was of Scottish ancestry, briskly surveyed Scotland's national character.

Notestein's most enduring work, The English People on the Eve of Colonization, 1603-1630 (1954), part of the New American Nation series, synthesizes decades of research on social, political, and cultural conditions in Stuart England. Four Worthies (1956), the last work that Notestein published during his lifetime, detailed the biographies of some seventeenth-century figures whose careers illustrated conditions in their era.

Besides writing numerous books, Notestein contributed some 100 articles, reviews, and commentaries to scholarly journals that appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. His style displayed not only great erudition but also literary skill and personal charm.

Achievements

• Notestein's doctoral dissertation, "A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718, " was awarded the Herbert Adams Prize and published as a prize essay by the American Historical Association in 1911. The British prime minister recognized Notestein's contributions to English history by appointing him to the Treasury Committee on the House of Commons Records. Notestein's research helped produce a seven-volume edition of Commons Debates, 1621 (1935), a work that critically examines the notes and records of speeches delivered in Parliament and reproduces numerous scarce documents.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The House of Commons: 1604-1610

    (Based upon a wealth of primary sources and a life of rese...)

  • Conquest and Kultur (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Conquest and Kultur The present war isoin t...)

  • English People on the Eve of Colonization, 1603-1630

    (ENGLAND UP TO 1603;' THE ENGLISH CHARACTER ;' THE COUNTRY...)

  • A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718

    (Wallace Notestein (1878–1969) was an American historian a...)

  • Source Problem: The Growth of the Powers of Parliament; English History (Hist. 31), Cornell University; January, 1921 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Source Problem: The Growth of the Powers of ...)

Personality

Students found Notestein a warm and enthusiastic teacher and referred to him affectionately as "Note. "

Of average height and slight of build, Notestein remained agile well into his later years.

Quotes from others about the person

• "A hurrying scuffle of footsteps, a cheery hel-lo, and there he would come, with a great load of books under his arm. Bent a little sideways and forward, he seemed, but more out of eagerness than from his burden--felt hat all crushed and askew on his head--a cigarette half swallowed between his lips. "

Interests

• Long walks

• Sport & Clubs

  Golf

Connections

Notestein married Ada Louise Comstock, the president of Radcliffe College, on June 14, 1943; they had no children.

Father:

Jonas O. Notestein

educator

Mother:

Margaret Wallace

Spouse:

Ada Louise Comstock

educator