William

William Francis Allen

William
#66,767
Most Influential Person Across History

American classical philologist

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William Francis Allen
Literature
#5323
Historical Rank
Classical Studies
#59
Historical Rank
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According to Wikipedia, William Francis Allen was an American classical scholar and an editor of the first book of American slave songs, Slave Songs of the United States. Allen was born in Northborough, Massachusetts in 1830, the son of Joseph Allen. He graduated Harvard College in 1851; later he traveled and studied in Europe. A Unitarian, he considered the ministry before deciding to pursue a literary and scholarly career. In 1856, he became assistant principal at the West Newton English and Classical School in Massachusetts, headed by his cousin Nathaniel Topliff Allen. In 1862 he married a former student of the Allen School, Mary Tileston Lambert, daughter of Rev Henry and Catherine Porter Lambert, from West Newton. In 1863–4, during the Civil War, William and his wife Mary ran a school for newly emancipated slaves on the Sea Islands of South Carolina. His detailed journals about their this experience were published in A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina: William Allen's Civil War Journals. In 1864 and 1865, he worked as a sanitary agent among black war refugees in Arkansas. He returned to the Lambert family home in West Newton, MA in 1865 in time for the birth of their daughter Katherine, followed by the death of his wife Mary one month later.

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