1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Woolsey, Theodore Dwight

WOOLSEY, THEODORE DWIGHT (1801-1889), American educationalist, was born in New York City on the 31st of October 1801. He was the son of a New York merchant, a nephew of Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, and a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. He graduated at Yale in 1820, was a tutor at Yale in 1823-1825, studied Greek at Leipzig, Berlin and Bonn in 1827-1830, became professor of Greek language and literature at Yale in 1831, and was elected president of the college and entered the Congregational ministry in 1846. He resigned the presidency in 1871, and died on the 1st of July 1889 in New Haven. During his administration the college grew rapidly, the scientific school and the school of fine arts were established, and the scholarly tone of the college was greatly improved. Much of his attention in his last years was devoted to the American commission for the revision of the authorized version of the New Testament, of which he was chairman (1871-1881). He prepared excellent editions of Alcestis (1834), Antigone (1835), Prometheus (1837) and Gorgias (1843). He published several volumes of sermons and wrote for the New Englander, of which he was a founder, for the North American Review, for the Princeton Review and for the Century, and his Introduction to the Study of International Law, designed as an Aid in Teaching and in Historical Studies (1860) and his Divorce and Divorce Legislation (1882) went through many editions. He also wrote Political Science, or the State Theoretically and Practically Considered (1877), and Communism and Socialism, in their History and Theory (1880). His son, Theodore Salisbury Woolsey (b. 1852), became professor of international law at Yale in 1878. He was one of the founders of the Yale Review (1892, a continuation of the New Englander), and is the author of America's Foreign Policy (1892).