Frederick John Teggart (1870–1946) was an Irish-American historian and social scientist, known for work on the history of

civilization A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system). ...

Life

He was born in

Belfast Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdom ...

on 9 May 1870, and was educated at

Methodist College Belfast God with us , established = 1865 , type = Voluntary grammar , religion = Interdenominational , principal = Jenny Lendrum , chair_label = Chairwoman , chair = Revd. Dr Janet Unsworth , founder ...

and Trinity College, Dublin. He emigrated to the United States and graduated B.A. at Stanford University in 1894. He then worked as a librarian, first at Stanford and then at the Mechanics-Mercantile Library in San Francisco. He had positions at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Franci ...

, becoming Associate Professor there in 1911; in 1919 a new department was set up for him, at Berkeley, the Department of Social Institutions. A full professor in 1925, he retired in 1940, although he remained actively engaged in research until shortly before his death. He supervised

Robert Nisbet Robert Alexander Nisbet (; September 30, 1913 – September 9, 1996) was an American sociologist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Vice-Chancellor at the University of California, Riverside, and an Albert Schweitzer Profess ...

's doctorate studies.

Influence on Toynbee

When Arnold J. Toynbee was still forming his concept for

A Study of History ''A Study of History'' is a 12-volume universal history by the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, published from 1934 to 1961. It received enormous popular attention but according to historian Richard J. Evans, "enjoyed only a brief vogue befo ...

he read some of Teggart's works. "You are quite right about my debt to Professor Teggart," he wrote U.C. sociology professor Margaret T. Hodgen. "I read . .his books at a time when, though I knew what I wanted to do, I still could not find the right starting point. Dr. Teggart's work, more than anyone else's, opened the door for me."

Works

''Prolegomena to history: the relation of history to literature, philosophy, and science''
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1916)
''The Processes of History''
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918) * ''Theory of History'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925) * ''Rome and China: a study of correlations in historical events'' (1939)

Notes

References

University of California: ''In Memoriam''

External links