author
Bernhard Marks
1832–1913
A 19th-century California educator and pioneer, he is best remembered for writing a hands-on geometry textbook for young students and for the lively letters he wrote about early Gold Rush California.
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About the author
Bernhard Marks was a German-born Jewish immigrant who became part of California's early pioneer generation. In the 1860s he served as principal of Lincoln School in San Francisco, and his best-known book, Marks’ First Lessons in Geometry (1869), was written as a practical classroom text for primary and grammar-school students.
His writing was closely tied to experience. A later collection of his correspondence, A California Pioneer: The Letters of Bernhard Marks to Jacob Solis-Cohen (1853–1857), preserves his firsthand impressions of life in California during a dramatic period of change, giving modern readers a personal window into the era.
Beyond the classroom, Marks has also been remembered in California local history as a land developer and one of the figures associated with the founding of Dos Palos. Reliable biographical information on him is fairly limited online, but the surviving educational work and letters show a teacher with a clear, practical style and a front-row view of the American West.