Frederic L. Paxson

Frederic Logan Paxson (February 23, 1877 in Philadelphia – October 24, 1948 in Berkeley, California) was an American historian. He also served as the President of Mississippi Valley Historical Association. He had undergraduate and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master's from Harvard University. He taught at Wisconsin (1910 to 1932) as a successor to Frederick Jackson Turner and the University of California-Berkeley from 1932 to 1947.

As a historian, he had an authority on the American frontier. His 1925 Pulitzer Prize was for History of the American Frontier, 1763–1893.

Teaching

Among his students were Earl S. Pomeroy and Ira Clark. They admired his teaching greatly. Clark said Paxson gave students "a sense of participating in his exploration of the past" and of "contact with living men and problems of narrative". Pomeroy said that Paxson was not given to philosophical speculation, but rather spoke of "techniques and of specific problems and their meaning more than of validity in the abstract". Paxson also advised his students to make an attempt at synthesis, however tentative and inexact. Pomeroy notes that Paxson had a masterful knowledge of political history and "found the political framework, among other conventional frameworks, indispensable in telling a general story". However, Paxson also insisted on the importance of economic and social history and had himself published on such subjects as the rise of sport and the highway movement.

Paxson coined the term "Historical Engineering" to describe the wartime work he had done in revising textbooks to suit the mood of the era of the World War, by "explaining the issues of the war that we might the better win it".