John Fiske (March 30, 1842 – July 4, 1901) was an American philosopher and historian. He was heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer and applied Spencer's concepts of evolution to his own writings on linguistics, philosophy, religion, and history.
Biography
John Fiske was born Edmund Fiske Green at Hartford, Connecticut, March 30, 1842. He was the only child of Edmund Brewster Green, of Smyrna, Delaware, and Mary Fiske Bound, of Middletown, Connecticut. His father was editor of newspapers in Hartford, New York City, and Panama, where he died in 1852, and his widow married Edwin W. Stoughton, of New York, in 1855. On the second marriage of his mother, Edmund Fiske Green assumed the name of his maternal great-grandfather, John Fiske.
As a child, Fiske exhibited remarkable precocity. He lived at Middletown with his grandmother during childhood, and prior to his entering college he had read widely in English literature and history, had excelled in Greek and Latin work, and had studied several modern languages. He then entered Harvard, and graduated from Harvard College in 1863 and from Harvard Law School in 1865. He was admitted to the bar in 1864, but only briefly practiced law. His career as author began in 1861, with an article on "Mr. Buckle's Fallacies" published in the National Quarterly Review. Following his failure to earn enough money through law, he frequently contributed freelance articles to American and British periodicals.
From 1869 to 1871, he was university lecturer on philosophy at Harvard, in 1870 instructor in history there, and assistant librarian 1872–1879. On resigning the latter position in 1879, he was elected a member of the board of overseers, and at the expiration of the six-year term was re-elected in 1885. Beginning in 1881, he lectured annually on American history at Washington University in St. Louis and beginning in 1884 held a professorship of American history at that institution, but continued to make his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lectured on American history at University College London in 1879, and at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1880. He gave many hundreds of lectures, chiefly upon American history, in the principal cities of the United States and Great Britain. Fiske was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1884.
