1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Rhodes, James Ford

RHODES, JAMES FORD (1848-), American historian, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on the 1st of May 1848. He entered the university of New York as a special student in 1865, studied at the university of Chicago in 1866-67, and at the Collège de France in 1867-68, and in 1868 served as occasional Paris correspondent to the Chicago Times. He then took a course in metallurgy in the School of Mines, at Berlin; subsequently inspected iron and steel works in western Germany and in Great Britain; and in 1870 joined his father in the iron, steel and coal business in Cleveland, becoming a member of the firm in 1874. He retired from business with an ample fortune in 1885, and after two years devoted to general reading and travel he began his History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, which, closing the narrative with the year 1877, was published in seven volumes in 1893-1906. In recognition of the merit of his work he received honorary degrees from various American universities, was elected president of the American Historical Association in 1899, and received the Loubet prize of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1901. In 1909 he published a volume of Historical Essays.