Hubert Howe Bancroft

Born in Granville, Ohio, in 1832, Hubert Howe Bancroft moved to California in the early 1850s and built a successful book and publishing business in San Francisco. While working as a bookseller, he began collecting documents, memoirs, and reference works on the history of the West.

That collecting effort grew into an enormous research library and an ambitious publishing program. Bancroft is best known for the multi-volume Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, a large history of western North America that covered California, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Mexico, and Central America. He relied on assistants and researchers as well as his own editorial direction, which made the project unusually large for its time.

He died in 1918 in California, but his legacy remained influential through the historical materials he gathered. The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, reflects the lasting importance of his collecting and his role in shaping how the history of the American West was preserved and written.