William Milligan Sloane

Born in Ohio in 1850, William Milligan Sloane graduated from Columbia College and later studied in Berlin and Leipzig while working with the historian and diplomat George Bancroft. He taught at Princeton before moving to Columbia, where he led the history department and became known as a lively, influential teacher of European history.

Sloane wrote widely on modern Europe, politics, religion, and democracy, but his best-known work was his multi-volume Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, a project that reflected his long interest in the Napoleonic era. His career also reached beyond the classroom: he served as president of the American Historical Association and was active in major literary and scholarly institutions.

He also played a notable part in the birth of the modern Olympic Games, serving as an American delegate in the 1890s and helping organize the movement in the United States. That mix of scholarship, teaching, and public service made him a distinctive figure in American intellectual life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.