author
Jesse Macy
1842–1919
A Civil War veteran turned pioneering political scientist, he spent decades teaching at Grinnell College and writing clearly about American parties, government, and reform. His work helped bring the study of politics into the modern college classroom.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Indiana in 1842 and raised in Iowa in a Quaker family, Jesse Macy came of age in the years leading up to the Civil War. He served the Union during the war, then studied at Iowa College, later known as Grinnell College, where he would spend most of his professional life.
Macy became one of the early American scholars to focus on political science as its own field. He taught at Grinnell for many years and wrote books on American political parties, civil government, and public life, with a special interest in how parties and institutions actually worked.
Remembered as both a teacher and an author, he helped shape the study of American politics at a time when the discipline was still taking form. His background in reform-minded Quaker culture and his firsthand experience of the Civil War gave his historical writing a practical, human perspective.