author
Arthur Clinton Boggess
1874–1955
Best known for a detailed history of early Illinois, this scholar wrote with a clear eye for how frontier communities took shape. His work remains useful for readers interested in settlement, institutions, and the making of the American Midwest.
1 Audiobook
The settlement of Illinois, 1778-1830
by Arthur Clinton Boggess
About the author
Arthur Clinton Boggess was an American historian whose best-known book, The Settlement of Illinois, 1778–1830, was published by the Chicago Historical Society in 1908. Library records and public reference sources also connect him with Calendar of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin in the Library of the University of Pennsylvania, showing a second strand of his work in documentary and archival history.
The surviving record suggests a writer deeply interested in the foundations of American public life: western settlement, local government, and the preservation of historical papers. Even from the small number of works that are easy to confirm today, he comes across as a careful researcher more concerned with assembling evidence than with showy prose.
He was born in 1874 and died in 1955. Read now, his work offers a window into how early twentieth-century historians tried to reconstruct the growth of places like Illinois from scattered records and frontier-era sources.