Moses Coit Tyler: The First Professor of American History in the United States

Abstract

LITTLE MORE THAN A CENTURY AGO, in 1881, Moses Coit Tyler was invited to Cornell to fill the first professorship of United States history created at any American university. It is fascinating to re-examine the circumstances of that episode because doing so provides us with an opportunity to look at the teaching of history in late nineteenth-century America, at the origins of the historical profession, at the Anglo-American cultural context that shaped Tyler's outlook, and finally, at the achievements as well as the limitations of his work. Perhaps we should begin, though, with a seemingly simple question: who was Moses Coit Tyler? His forebears had migrated from England to the Plymouth Colony around 1640. Moses was born in Griswold, Connecticut, in 1835; but his restless family moved westward that very year, first to Constantia, New York, in Oswego County, and then in 1837 to various towns in Michigan: Marshall, Burlington, Union City, and in 1842, Detroit. There he attended public schools as