historian, professor, author, b. Philadelphia, Pa. He graduated from the Univ. of Pennsylvania (B.S., 1898), Harvard Univ. (M.A., 1902), and the Univ. of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1903). He taught history in the Pennsylvania secondary schools (1899-1901), and in 1901 went to the Univ. of Colorado, where he served as assistant professor of history (1903-1904), and professor (1904-1906). From 1906 to 1910 he taught at the Univ. of Michigan. In 1910 he came to the Univ. of Wisconsin to fill the position formerly held by Frederick Jackson Turner (q.v.) and was professor of history at Wisconsin from 1910 to 1932. In 1932 he moved to Berkeley, Calif., and served as professor of history at the Univ. of California until his death. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army as a major in charge of the economic mobilization section, historical branch of the war plans division (1918-1919). Paxson was president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (1917) and of the American Historical Association (1938). He was curator of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (1911-1932). In 1939 he was made a member of the advisory committee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt library. An exponent of the frontier hypothesis, he was the author of numerous works on American history, among which are The Last American Frontier (1910), The New Nation (1915), and The History of the American Frontier (1924), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in that year. Who's Who in Amer., 25 (1948); Pacific Hist. Review, 18 (1949); Madison Wis. State Journal, Oct. 25, 1948.

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[Source: Dictionary of Wisconsin biography]