author

Henry W. B. (Henry Ward Beecher) Howard

1849–1906

A Brooklyn writer and editor whose surviving work opens a window onto the city’s civic life in the late 1800s. Best known for helping shape a large commemorative history of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he wrote in a way that mixed local pride with a strong sense of place.

1 Audiobook

Campfire and battlefield : $b an illustrated history of the campaigns and conflicts of the great Civil War

Campfire and battlefield : $b an illustrated history of the campaigns and conflicts of the great Civil War

by Rossiter Johnson, Selden Connor, John Brown Gordon, Henry W. B. (Henry Ward Beecher) Howard, O. O. (Oliver Otis) Howard, John Tyler Morgan, John Clark Ridpath

About the author

Born in Brooklyn in 1849, Henry W. B. Howard — Henry Ward Beecher Howard — is known today mainly through historical and genealogical records and through the books that still survive under his name. Public domain catalog records connect him with works including The Eagle and Brooklyn and Abraham Howard of Marblehead, Mass., and His Descendants, showing interests in both local history and family history.

His best-known book is The Eagle and Brooklyn (1893), a large illustrated volume issued to mark the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s semi-centennial and move into a new building. In that project, Howard served as editor, working with Arthur N. Jervis, and the book set the story of the newspaper alongside a broader history of Brooklyn itself.

Howard died in 1906. While not a widely documented literary figure today, his surviving work remains useful to readers interested in Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century growth, newspaper culture, and the kind of ambitious civic histories that tried to capture an entire city in print.