Benjamin Franklin Schappelle

Benjamin Franklin Schappelle was an American writer and researcher born in 1885. The clearest surviving record of his work is The German Element in Brazil: Colonies and Dialect, published in 1917.

That book began as a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Pennsylvania. In it, he explored the history of German settlement in Brazil and paid special attention to the dialects that grew within those immigrant communities, aiming to introduce English-speaking readers to a subject that was not widely known.

Reliable biographical details about his personal life are hard to confirm from easily available sources, so most of what can be said with confidence comes from the record of his published work rather than from a fuller public biography.