Max Farrand

Max Farrand (March 29, 1869 – June 17, 1945) was an American historian and university professor. Farrand served as the first director of the Huntington Library.

Early life

He was born in Newark, New Jersey, United States. He graduated from Princeton with a Bachelors of Arts in 1892 and a PhD in 1896.

Career

From 1908 to 1925, he was a professor of history at Yale University. Prior to his position at Yale, Farrand also taught at Wesleyan University, Stanford University, and Cornell University. Farrand's area of expertise was constitutional history. Farrand served as director of the Commonwealth Fund, founded in 1918 by Anna M. Harkness.

Farrand assisted Henry E. Huntington in establishing the Huntington Library, located on the historic Rancho Huerta de Cuati' in San Marino, California. Following Huntington's death in 1927, Farrand became the library's first director, serving until 1941.

In 1921, Farrand was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected in 1926 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1928.

In 1940, Farrand, as President of the American Historical Society delivered an address describing his views on history.

Farrand's final work, an examination of the letters of Benjamin Franklin, was published posthumously in 1949.

Family

In 1913, Farrand married the landscape architect Beatrix Farrand. They remodeled her family's home, Reef Point Estate in Bar Harbor, Maine, where they spent their summers. They had no children. Farrand's brother was the researcher Livingston Farrand.