The Biographical Dictionary of America/Bancroft, Frederic

BANCROFT, Frederic, librarian, was born in Galesburg, Ill., Oct. 30, 1860. He was graduated from Amherst college in 1882, studied law and political science at Columbia college, and went to Europe, where he spent a semester in Göttingen university. After taking his degree he occupied two and a half years in the study of history, political economy and diplomacy at Berlin, Freiburg (Baden) and in the Ećole des Sciences Politiques at Paris. In Freiburg he was a special student in United States history of the historian Von Holst. In the spring of 1888 he was lecturing at Amherst college on the political history of the civil war and reconstruction, when he was appointed by Secretary Bayard the chief of the bureau of rolls and library in the department of state. In 1885 he printed for private circulation "The Negro in Politics, Especially in South Carolina and Mississippi." While in Berlin and Paris, he was the occasional correspondent of the New York Evening Post and the Epoch. In 1889 he won a prize lectureship in the Columbia school of political science, and lectured on the diplomatic history of the United States. Dr. Bancroft contributed to Harper's Weekly and to the Political Science Quarterly, and wrote a "Life of William H. Seward." He received the degrees of A. B., and A. M., from Amherst, that of Ph. D., from Columbia, in 1885, and LL. D., from Knox in 1900.