H.H.BANCROFT.COM
A Website for the exploration and dissemination of the literary works and legacy of Hubert Howe Bancroft
The Man
The Works
Methodologies
The era in which he lived
Legacy
Controversies
Bancroft's WEST
Best of Bancroft
Bancroft's Businesses
H.H. Bancroft Store
miners of HSSTORY
H.U.B.E.R.T.
Bancroft Project
Bancroft on the Web
Hubert Howe Bancroft was a prolific writer of Western
American History. A self-made millionaire, bookseller, and publisher, Hubert
Howe Bancroft captured the history of the Pacific States as he called them,
with a thoroughness and accuracy that remains without equal 120 years after
their publication.
Sadly, little is remembered of his complete body of work,
and few of his volumes are available via the internet.
The following sites do have online versions of some of his
works.
For a complete list of his works, see:
Works online
First-Hand History has jpeg copies of the pages of the
following volumes:
Ancestry.com and Gale’s free
portal have 38 out of 39 volumes of Bancroft’s Works (They are missing
Volume 9- History of Mexico) all in a low resolution picture page format. They also
have renumbered the pages for their free viewer, and restart their numbers with
each new chapter. Up until about April, 2005, the offered a higher resolution
version of their pages, but since then, their viewer software only allows you
to access the lower resolution pages.
Similar to my own experiences in discovering Bancroft, the
Library of Congress became the first online publisher of Literary
Industries, as part of their collection of first
person narratives of the
The Gutenberg Project was an ambitious effort first conceived by Michael
Hart in 1971. I recall seeing an article in the WSJ about his pioneering
efforts, and I was able to call him up and chat about the project, which at the
time, predated the internet and the World Wide Web by several years.
There is one e-text written by Bancroft in the Gutenberg
Project collection.
The New Pacific
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=philamer;idno=AJA1447.0001.001
Chapters include:
- Now
and then. 2. The year of ninety-eight. 3. European barbarism in
This copy is courtesy of one of the
Nineteenth
Century American Publishing [8
collections]
Collections of books and journals published in the
American Verse Project
[collection home]
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
[collection home]
Garden and Forest
[collection home]
Making of America Books
[collection home]
This collection is a great first start at digitizing the
best of the past historical references of Western American History. Among the
volumes of interest to Bancroft enthusiasts are the following:
Titus Fey Cronise’s Natural Wealth of
California
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AJL3430.0001.001
Caughey
quotes Ruth Doxsee as saying this book is “so well
done typographically that it might be placed first on the list of books which
have been produced on the
Hittell’s
Resources
of California
Index of 41 citations of Hubert
Howe Bancroft, including Frederick Jackson Turner, Overland Monthly, etc.
Making of America Journal Articles
[collection home]
Making of Ann Arbor Text Collection
[collection home]
Michigan County Histories
[collection home]
The United States and its Territories, 1870 - 1925: The Age of Imperialism
[collection home]
After publishing his Works, Hubert Howe Bancroft realized
that after getting the chronological history of the Pacific States down, he
still needed to chronicle the biographical record of the American West. His
Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth were his next great publishing
effort. Totaling 7 volumes plus an index, this set was met with some criticism
for being vanity publishing. However,
they remain an excellent source of biographical data on many pioneers, and the
concise overviews and summaries of the history of selected industries and
topics of the entire West are a hidden vein of historical wealth that has yet
to be mined.
See Caughey’s biography of Hubert
Howe Bancroft, pp317-318.
No one in the
Chronicles of the Builders
Volume 1 690 pages
http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/ItemRecord/14086?id=62ef3c982a89d6b7
Volume 2 671 pages
http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/ItemRecord/14087?id=62ef3c982a89d6b7
Volume 3
705 pages
http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/ItemRecord/14088?id=62ef3c982a89d6b7
Volume 4
695 pages
http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/ItemRecord/14089?id=62ef3c982a89d6b7
Volume 5
717 pages
http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/ItemRecord/14090?id=62ef3c982a89d6b7
Volume 6
683 pages
http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/ItemRecord/14090?id=62ef3c982a89d6b7
Volume 7 689 pages
http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/ItemRecord/14092?id=62ef3c982a89d6b7
ECO (Early Canadiana Online) has
several other Bancroft items of interest, including the Edinburgh Review’s
October 1876 book review of
Bancroft’s Native Races 35 pp which can be accessed here.
Alternate portal into the Chronicles volumes, courtesy of
ulib.org
http://serv.ul.cs.cmu.edu/zoom/record.html?id=665
After publishing the Chronicles, Hubert Howe Bancroft had an
opportunity to publish the Book of the Fair.
History of the 1893 World’s Fair, the
Columbian Exposition--celebrating the 400th anniversary of
Link
to Online Book of the Fair
After Bancroft’s exquisite expose of the 1893 World’s Fair,
he chose to document the role of the entrepreneur in his Book of Wealth.
Book of Wealth listing from UCB
Book of Wealth listing at UCLA
While this book set is extremely scarce [fewer than 900
copies], a few websites do quote from it.
First Quote
John: “There’s a book that came out in 1895
called ‘The Book of Wealth’, and it was by Hubert Howe Bancroft. And it was the
history of the greatest institutions, organisations
and individuals in history that ever had fortune in wealth. And it showed very
clearly that spirit without matter is expressionless and matter without spirit
is motionless - and what that means is that the two greatest driving forces of
the human being is a spiritual quest and a material quest.”
Second Quote
"Wealth in its nobler aspects is not an unworthy theme.
There is nothing desirable or honorable in penury, nothing praiseworthy or
attractive in want or dependence. Indigence leads not to intellectual culture
or to a lofty standard of morality. Purity is not the offspring of poverty, but
comes of that cleanliness of soul which is akin to godliness."
Hubert Howe Bancroft - The Book of Wealth
Two buyers on amazon.com are waiting for a copy of the Book
of Wealth.