Lester Frank Ward papers (Ms.90.23)

Biographical/Historical note

Lester Frank Ward was born in 1841 as the youngest of a poor Illinois farmer's ten children. From these humble beginnings he rose to international prominence as a scientist and scholar.

Ward received little formal education until after the Civil War, when he entered government service in Washington, D.C. Subsequently he attended Columbian College, earning a B.A. degree in 1869, an LL.B. in 1871, and an M.A. in botany in 1871.

He joined the Department of the Interior's U. S. Geological Survey team in 1881 as an assistant geologist in charge of paleobotany. When he left government employment twenty-five years later, he had advanced to the rank of chief paleontologist and, concurrently, had commenced the career as a teacher and writer which in 1906 brought him to Brown University as a professor of sociology. He died in 1913.

His chief publications include Dynamic Sociology (1883), which embodies his influential evolutionary theory of human progress; Psychic Factors of Civilization (1893); Pure Sociology (1903); and a Text-Book of Sociology, co-authored with James Q. Dealey (1905). Ward's final work, a six-volume compilation of his minor writing, grandly entitled Glimpses of the Cosmos, was published after his death in 1913. Further biographical details may be found in the articles on Ward in The Dictionary of American Biography, XIX. 430-432.