Stephen Bartow Baxter (March 8, 1929 − September 15, 2020) was an American historian specialising in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century English history. He was educated at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

and

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any ...

before working at

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College ( ) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the America ...

and the

University of Missouri The University of Missouri (Mizzou or MU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri, United States. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus Univers ...

. He was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

in 1959-1960 for which he spent seven years researching his biography of

William III of England William III (William Henry; ; 4 November 1650 – 8 March 1702), also known as William of Orange, was the sovereign Prince of Orange from birth, Stadtholder of County of Holland, Holland, County of Zeeland, Zeeland, Lordship of Utrecht, Utrec ...

. His biography of William III remains the standard scholarly study, and projects a highly favorable view of the king Of England, 1689-1702: :William III was the Deliverer of England from the tyranny and arbitrary government of the Stuarts....He repaired and improved an obsolete system of government, and left it strong enough to withstand the stresses of the next century virtually unchanged. The army of Marlborough, and that of Wellington, and to a large extent that of Raglan, was the creation of William III. So too was the independence of the judiciary..... is governmentwas very expensive; at their peak the annual expenditures of William III were four times as large as those of James II. This new scale of government was bitterly unpopular. But the new taxes, which were not in fact heavy by comparison with those borne by the Dutch, made England a great power. And they contributed to the prosperity of the country while they contributed to its strength, by the process which is now called 'pump-priming.'

Works

*''The Development of the Treasury, 1660-1702'' (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957). *''William III and the Defense of European Liberty, 1650-1702'' (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966). *''England's Rise to Greatness, 1660-1763'' (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).

Notes

External links

Profile
at the University of North Carolina 1929 births 2020 deaths Historians of England Harvard University alumni Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Dartmouth College faculty University of Missouri faculty University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty American expatriates in the United Kingdom 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers American male non-fiction writers {{US-historian-stub