Howard

in November 1888. The country was ready for
this type of production, and Howard had the
adroitness to develop the material with its nat-
ural conflicts of personal and national loyalties
and its wealth of melodramatic possibilities.

Howard's prestige in his day and his place in
dramatic chronicles are dependent largely on
these six successes. He was not prolific in
writing or fertile in invention. His entire play
list runs to only twenty-one in forty-two years,
and, with the elimination of the two rewritten
scripts, the two products of collaboration, the
two adaptations, and the two negligible bits with
which he began and ended his authorship, the to-
tal is reduced to thirteen original items. Of these,
the half-dozen mentioned fared well in New
York and widely on the theatrical "road." How-
ard's confession of dramatic faith, The Auto-
biography of a Play (read before the Shake-
speare Club of Harvard University in 1886,
printed in In Memoriam, 1910, and published
separately in 1914) reveals, or betrays, an almost
complete obliviousness to dramatic literature
and critical theory. What he regarded as laws
of dramatic composition were laws which he de-
rived from the reactions of the New York audi-
ences of his generation. He accepted as univer-
sal what were only temporary and local habits of
mind. His sober enunciations on dramatic tech-
nique are therefore much more naive than pro-
found; but the plays based on these conclusions
provide an interesting index to a passing phase
of American culture. He was rightly recognized
as a representative playwright of his period. In
this role he served as founder and first president
of the American Dramatist's Club which later
developed into the Society of American Drama-
tists and Composers. In his later years he la-
bored effectively in the successful campaign for
the adequate revision of American laws on inter-
national copyright. He died in 1908, leaving his
dramatic library to the society in which he had
been the prime mover.

[Biog. sketch by H. P. Mawson in In Memoriam
Bronson Howard (1910), issued by the Soc. of Am.
Dramatists; M. J. Moses, The Am. Dramatist (1925
ed.) ; A. H. Quinn, A Hist, of the Am. Drama from the
Civil War to the Present Day (1927), vol. I; critical
articles by Clayton Hamilton, in Bookman, Sept. 1908,
and Brander Matthews, in North Am. Rev., Oct. 1908 ;
Who's Who in America, 1908-09 ; N. Y. Times, Aug. 5,

P.H.B— n.

HOWARD, GEORGE ELLIOTT (Oct. i,
i849-June 9, 1928), teacher and scholar, son of
Isaac and Margaret (Hardin) Howard, was born
at Saratoga, N. Y. He went to Nebraska in a
"covered wagon" in 1868, only a year after the
admission of the state to the Union, and for a
time lived the life of a pioneer in what was then

Howard

the Great West. Desire for a higher education
led him to the State Normal School at Peru,
where he was graduated in 1870. The Univer-
sity of Nebraska, which opened the doors of its
single building in 1871, next attracted him, and
he received his degree (A.B.) there in 1876,
being a member of the second class to complete
a Ml four-year course. Following his gradua-
tion he went to Europe to study. He passed two
years abroad, mainly in Munich and Paris, as a
student of history and Roman law. Upon his re-
turn to the United States he became the first
professor of history in the University of Ne-
braska. He was also one of the founders, and
served for several years as the secretary, of the
State Historical Society. In spite of a heavy
teaching schedule and most inadequate facili-
ties, he found it possible to combine research
with instruction. The result was the publication
in 1889, as one of the Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Studies in Historical and Political Science
(Extra Volume IV), of his monograph, An In-
troduction to the Local Constitutional History
of the United States. It is a substantial, scholarly
work, dealing with the development of the town-
ship, hundred, and shire. A companion volume
on municipal institutions, though projected and
partly written, never appeared. In 1890 he pub-
lished a valuable study, "On the Development
of the King's Peace and the English Local
Peace-Magistracy" (University Studies of the
University of Nebraska).

The reputation which he had now acquired
brought him notable recognition in 1891, when
President David Starr Jordan chose him to be
one of the fifteen professors who formed the orig-
inal faculty of Stanford University. There he
remained for almost a decade, organizing, as at
Nebraska, a strong department of history. As
a lecturer he had great gifts, and students ac-
customed to consider history the dullest of sub-
jects went away from his classroom filled with
enthusiasm for the past as he revealed it His
career at Stanford ended abruptly in 1901,
when he resigned from the faculty in protest
against the dismissal of Prof. Edward A. Ross.
Howard felt very deeply that academic freedom
had been imperiled at Stanford; he publicly criti-
cized the University management before his class-
es ; and, upon being required either to apologize
for his action or to sever his connection with the
institution, he resigned forthwith. This meant
laying down a life position and sacrificing mate-
rial welfare to what he regarded as justice and
right Nevertheless, he never showed in later
years the least sign of regretting his bold action.

Howard now engaged for several years main-

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