William H. Prescott

William Hickling Prescott (May 4, 1796 – January 28, 1859) was an American historian and Hispanist. Historiographers widely consider him the first American scientific historian. Though his vision was severely impaired—at times preventing him from reading or writing on his own—he rose to become one of the most distinguished historians in 19th-century America. He also possessed an eidetic, or photographic, memory.

After a long period of study, during which he occasionally contributed to academic journals, Prescott focused on late Renaissance Spain and the early Spanish Empire. His major works on this subject—*The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic* (1837), *The History of the Conquest of Mexico* (1843), *A History of the Conquest of Peru* (1847), and the unfinished *History of the Reign of Philip II* (1856–1858)—are now classics. They greatly influenced the study of both Spain and Mesoamerica. In his own time, he was seen as one of the greatest living American intellectuals and personally knew many leading political figures in the United States and Britain. Prescott became one of the most translated American historians and played a key role in establishing history as a rigorous academic discipline.

Historians praise Prescott for his thorough, careful, and systematic use of archives, his accurate reconstruction of events, his balanced judgments, and his lively prose. He concentrated on political and military affairs, largely ignoring the economic, social, intellectual, and cultural forces emphasized by later historians. Instead, he wrote narrative history, weaving unstated causal forces into his driving storylines.

**Early life**

William H. Prescott was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on May 4, 1796, the first of seven children; four of his siblings died in infancy. His parents were William Prescott Jr., a lawyer, and Catherine Greene Hickling. His grandfather, also named William Prescott, was a colonel in the American Revolutionary War.

Prescott began formal schooling at age seven under Jacob Knapp. In 1808, his family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where his father’s earnings grew. He continued his studies under Dr. John Gardiner, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church. As a young man, he often visited the Boston Athenæum, which then held John Quincy Adams’s 10,000-volume private library while Adams was on a diplomatic mission to Russia. In 1832, Prescott became a trustee of the library, a role he held for 15 years.

In August 1811, at age 15, Prescott entered Harvard College as a sophomore. He was not academically outstanding, though he showed promise in Latin and Greek. He struggled with mathematics and, to hide this, memorized mathematical proofs word-for-word—something he could do easily. His eyesight deteriorated after he was hit in the eye with a crust of bread during a food fight; it remained weak and unstable for the rest of his life. As a senior, he was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, a great personal honor, and graduated in 1814. After a brief bout of rheumatic illness, he set off on an extended European tour.

He first traveled to São Miguel in the Azores, where his grandfather and Portuguese grandmother lived. After two weeks, he went to London’s cooler climate, staying with surgeon Astley Cooper and oculist William Adams. While with Adams, Prescott first used a noctograph, a tool that became a permanent aid, letting him write independently despite his poor eyesight. He visited Hampton Court Palace with future president John Quincy Adams, then a diplomat in London, and saw the Raphael Cartoons. In August 1816, he traveled to Paris, then moved on to Italy for the winter. He returned to Paris in early 1817, where he happened to meet American Hispanist George Ticknor, and made another visit to England. He spent time in Cambridge, seeing Isaac Newton’s manuscripts, and returned to the United States later that year. His first academic work, an anonymous essay, was rejected by the *North American Review* in late 1817. After a short courtship, he married Susan Amory, daughter of poet Thomas Coffin Amory and Hannah Rowe Linzee, on May 4, 1820.

**Career: Early work and *The History of Ferdinand and Isabella***

In 1821, due to his worsening eyesight, Prescott abandoned plans for a legal career and decided to devote himself to literature. He initially studied a wide range of subjects—Italian, French, English, and Spanish literature, American history, classics, and political philosophy—but eventually focused on Italian poetry. Among the works he studied were Dante’s *Divine Comedy* and Boccaccio’s *Decameron*. His first published pieces were two essays in the *North American Review*, both on Italian poetry. The first, *Italian Narrative Poetry* (1824), sparked controversy after it was harshly criticized in an Italian review by Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart’s *Don Giovanni*. Prescott wrote a concise reply to Da Ponte’s fifty-page argument in the same journal.