The Queen's College Record 2023

ARTICLES
Articles
The Harmsworth Professorship of American History
Michael F. Hopkins (1976), Reader in American Foreign
Policy at the University of Liverpool
Harold Harmsworth, 1 st Viscount Rothermere, the owner
of the Daily Mail, lost two sons in the First World War. To
honour their memory he created two university chairs. In
1918 he funded the Vere Harmsworth Chair in Naval History
at the University of Cambridge. In 1920 he endowed the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth
Professorship of American History at Oxford, the first university chair in American
history in the UK. Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard University was the first holder of
the post, serving from 1922 to 1925.
The founders had not considered a college affiliation for the Harmsworth Professor.
Morison did not hold a formal fellowship but became a member of the senior
common room of Christ Church. In 1923 the Royal Commission on Oxford and
Cambridge stipulated that all professorships should have a college affiliation and
in 1924 The Queen’s College agreed to establish a fellowship for the Harmsworth
Professor. College records do not reveal the reasons behind the decision. When
Robert McNutt McElroy was appointed in 1925 he became a fellow of Queen’s and
held the post until 1939.
The Second World War seriously disrupted subsequent appointments. There was no
Harmsworth Professor in Oxford for 1939-1940, Michaelmas Term 1940, 1941-1942,
1943-1944 and 1945-1946. Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker of Princeton University
was appointed for 1939-1940 but could not travel to Oxford, though he did take
up the post in 1944-1945. Allan Nevins of Columbia University was appointed for
1940-1941 but was only able to be in Oxford in January-June 1941, despite the
best efforts of the Provost of Queen’s, R. H. Hodgkin, to persuade him to remain
for another year. Nevins, nevertheless, made a major contribution to developing
American history at the University.
Morison had made an important start, devising a special subject, “The American
Revolution and the Formation of the Federal Constitution, 1760-1788 ” and publishing
a book of documents to accompany it. But American history remained undervalued
in Oxford and was not prominent in the undergraduate curriculum and examinations.
Nevins, however, had a greater impact. He proposed a new special subject, “Slavery
and Secession in the United States, January 1854-January 1863”, which attracted the
interest of a succession of Oxford students and tutors such as H. G. Nicholas of New
90 The Queen’s College | College Record 2023