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 and
Trinity College, Cambridge before working at
Dartmouth College and the
University of Missouri. He was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in 1959-1960 for which he spent seven years researching his biography of
William III of England.
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 government
In linguistics, a copula (plural: copulas or copulae; abbreviated ) is a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word ''is'' in the sentence "The sky is blue" or the phrase ''was not being'' in ...
was 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
Profileat 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
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