SPARKS, JARED (1789-1866), American historian and educator, was born in Willington (Conn.), on May io, 1789. He made a brilliant record in his studies and after labouring as a carpenter and teaching at a country school he graduated at Har vard in 1815. Private school teaching and a tutorship in mathe matics and natural philosophy at Harvard were but incidents in his career. He refused a professorship at Bowdoin college for the pastorate of a Unitarian church in Baltimore. In 1821 he founded The Unitarian Miscellany, and was chosen chaplain of the national House of Representatives, where he made many influential friends. Probably his natural bent towards writing as well as the state of his health was responsible for his leaving the ministry in 1823 and purchasing the North American Review, of which he had been act ing editor in 1817-18 and which he edited until 183o. This period ical by good management he made a financial success and the arbiter of literature in New England. But although he founded The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge in 183o, the major portion of his energy after 1826 was devoted to historical scholarship. Born in the shadow of the great figures of the Revolution, he did his most important work in The Life and Writ ings of George Washington (12 vols., 1834-37) and The Works
of Benjamin Franklin; with Notes, and a Life of the Author (lo vols., 1836-40). Another valuable project was The Library of American Biography (first series, 10 vols., 1834-38; second series, 15 vols., 1844-47), which he edited and to which he contributed a number of lives. Of lesser value are the Life and Travels of John Ledyard (1828) ; The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution (12 vols., 1829-30) ; The Life of Gouverneur Morris (3 vols., 1832) ; and Correspondence of the American Revolution, being Letters of Eminent Men to George Washington (1853). The esteem in which he was held in his day is shown not only by the large sale of his works but by his appointment in 1838 to the first American professorship of history at Harvard, and by his election to the presidency of that college in 1849. After his retirement in 1853 he lived quietly in Cambridge until his death on March 14, 1866.
See H. B. Adams, The Life and Writings of fared Sparks (2 vol., 1893) and J. S. Bassett, The Middle Group of American Historians (1917.)