Tyler Dennett
{{short description|American historian}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Tyler Dennett
| image =
| caption =
| birth_date = June 13, 1883
| nationality = American
| birth_place = Spencer, Wisconsin
| death_date = December 29, 1949
| death_place = Geneva, New York
| occupation = {{flatlist|
- Historian
- educator
- writer
}}
| alma_mater = Williams College (BA)
Union Theological Sem. (BD)
Johns Hopkins University (PhD)
| relatives =
}}
{{Infobox officeholder
| office = 3rd Department of State Historian
| term_start = 1924
| term_end = 1931
| preceded = Harry Dwight
| succeeded = David Hunter Miller
}}
{{sources|date=April 2025}}
Tyler Dennett (June 13, 1883 Spencer, Wisconsin – December 29, 1949 in Geneva, New York)[https://books.google.com/books?id=V08bjkJeXkAC&dq=Tyler+Dennett+1883+1949&pg=PA101 Wisconsin Biographical Dictionary]'Who's Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners,' pg. 16, 1999 was an American historian and educator. He received the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1933 book John Hay: From Poetry to Politics.
Early career and education
Born in Wisconsin, but raised in Rhode Island, Dennett graduated high school as valedictorian from the Moses Brown School in Providence.{{Cite web |title=(1934-1937) Dennett, Tyler |url=https://specialcollections.williams.edu/williams-history/presidents/dennett-tyler/ |access-date=2023-08-08 |website=Special Collections |language=en-US}} In 1900, Dennett enrolled at Bates College and then transferred to Williams College as a sophomore. At Williams, he was a member of the football team. After his graduation in the spring of 1904 and a year of work in Williamstown, Massachusetts he attended the Union Theological Seminary, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Divinity in 1908. He served briefly as a Congregational minister before leaving to pursue a career in journalism.{{cn|date=August 2023}}
Career
Among his early scholarly writings were The Democratic Movement in Asia (1918)[http://archives.williams.edu/?n=Dennett+Tyler Williams bio of President Dennett] and A Better World (1920). In 1922, he published Americans in Eastern Asia, a study of American policy in the Far East, which was well received and was long held as an important work in the field. Dennett published "President Roosevelt's Secret Pact with Japan" in 1924, the subject of which came to be known as the Taft–Katsura Agreement. The paper put forth the thesis that formerly-isolationist Japan and the US began to carve up their spheres of influence, which would later become world empires, with the agreement, which was therefore of first-class importance historically.President Roosevelt's Secret Pact with Japan, Tyler Dennett, The Current History Magazine, October, 1924, [http://www.icasinc.org/history/katsura.html] Later historians questioned that interpretation.The Taft-Katsura Agreement—Reality or Myth?, Raymond A. Esthus, Journal of Modern History 31 (1): 46–51. 1959, JSTOR [https://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1871772?uid=3739728&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101067925783] Dennett was awarded a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1925 based on this research on Theodore Roosevelt and the Russo-Japanese War.
He taught American history at Johns Hopkins University (1923–24) and at Columbia University (1927–28), and international relations at Princeton University (1931–34).{{cn|date=August 2023}} Most significantly, Dennett served as president of Williams College (1934–37), resigning after a disagreement with the college's board of trustees.[http://archives.williams.edu/williamshistory/greylock/resigndennett.php archives.williams.edu] The trustees planned to purchase the Greylock Hotel, which later became a dorm, but at the time Dennett felt the hotel had no useful purpose for the college. Dennett was also one of the future college presidents to speak out against Nazi Germany during this period, ending academic exchange programs with Nazi Germany in 1936.{{Cite web |last=Wills |first=Matthew |date=2021-12-10 |title=Silence in the Face of Intellectual Conflagration |url=https://daily.jstor.org/silence-in-the-face-of-intellectual-conflagration/ |access-date=2023-08-08 |website=JSTOR Daily |language=en-US}}
He received the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his book, John Hay: From Poetry to Politics (1933).[https://archive.org/details/johnhayfrompoetr017987mbp John Hay From Poetry To Politics on Archive.org]
Death
Notes
{{Reflist}}
Further reading
- Borg, Dorothy. "Two historians of the Far Eastern policy of the United States: Tyler Dennett and A. Whitney Griswold," in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931-1941 (1975) pp 551–574.
External links
- {{Find a Grave|36203050}}
- [https://archive.org/search?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Dennett%2C+Tyler%22+OR+subject%3A%22Tyler+Dennett%22+OR+creator%3A%22Dennett%2C+Tyler%22+OR+creator%3A%22Tyler+Dennett%22+OR+creator%3A%22Dennett%2C+T.%22+OR+title%3A%22Tyler+Dennett%22+OR+description%3A%22Dennett%2C+Tyler%22+OR+description%3A%22Tyler+Dennett%22%29+OR+%28%221883-1949%22+AND+Dennett%29%29+AND+%28-mediatype%3Asoftware%29 Works by or about Tyler Dennett] at Internet Archive
{{Williams College presidents}}
{{PulitzerPrize BiographyorAutobiographyAuthors 1926–1950}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dennett, Tyler}}
Category:People from Spencer, Wisconsin
Category:Writers from Wisconsin
Category:20th-century American historians
Category:American male non-fiction writers
Category:20th-century American biographers
Category:American male biographers
Category:Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners
Category:Presidents of Williams College
Category:Johns Hopkins University alumni
Category:Johns Hopkins University faculty
Category:Williams College alumni
Category:Historians of American foreign relations