author

Ruth A. McIntyre

A historian of early American colonial finance, she is best remembered for bringing the business side of Plymouth Colony to life in her book Debts Hopeful and Desperate. Her career also included decades of teaching and research, capped by a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on English merchants and early colonial enterprise.

1 Audiobook

Debts hopeful and desperate : $b Financing the Plymouth Colony

Debts hopeful and desperate : $b Financing the Plymouth Colony

by Ruth A. McIntyre

About the author

Ruth Allan McIntyre (April 26, 1915 – May 11, 1986) was an American historian from Springfield, Massachusetts. She studied at Mount Holyoke College, later earned her PhD in history from the University of Minnesota in 1947, and focused much of her scholarly work on English merchants, exploration, and colonial enterprise.

Over the course of her career, she taught at several institutions, including Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College, Wells College, and Holyoke Community College. In 1949, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for research on the part played by English merchants in early seventeenth-century discovery and colonization.

She is best known as the author of Debts Hopeful and Desperate (1963), a study of the financial world behind Plymouth Colony. Alongside her writing, she also worked on historical research connected to the Pynchon Papers, helping deepen the record of early New England history.