About the Book

Thomas William Herringshaw’s Encyclopedia of American Biography of the Nineteenth Century (1898) set out to give “accurate and succinct biographies of famous men and women in all walks of life” — and did so at enormous scale, in paragraphs of a few lines each.

Its value now is exactly its indiscriminateness: the famous sit beside the locally eminent, so it records a whole society’s idea of who counted.

This digital edition is built from a dual-engine OCR, reconciled page by page. The fuller lives have a page to themselves; the one-line lives run together in alphabetical stretches, as they do in the book.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1898 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.