Wilbur Kitchener Jordan

• 1. Introduction

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  Wilbur Kitchener Jordan, who published as W. K. Jordan, lived from 1902 to 1980 and became one of the leading American historians of Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His career turned on a question that still feels current: how does a society come to tolerate people who believe differently from the majority? He also turned down the presidency of a prestigious college in 1943 to take a different post. What path took a student from small-town Indiana to the heart of English religious history? Why has his four-volume study of toleration lasted for generations despite criticism? And what did he change for the women who studied under him?

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• 2. Lynnville to Harvard

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  Lynnville, Indiana, is where Jordan was raised. He earned a bachelor's degree at Oakland City College in 1923, then moved east to Harvard University. There he completed a master's degree in 1926 and a doctorate in 1931. The path from a small Indiana community to a Harvard doctorate gave him the training to work deeply in English history. His first major publication followed within a year of finishing the doctorate.

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• 3. The Toleration Volumes

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  Between 1932 and 1940, Jordan published The Development of Religious Toleration in England in four volumes. The work follows the origins of toleration through Elizabethan, Stuart, and revolutionary England. It then traces how those ideas evolved into the late seventeenth century, after the English Civil War. Critics have sometimes argued that Jordan gave too much weight to skeptical and secular motives behind toleration. Even so, the work is broad and thoroughly documented. Historians who study toleration in England today still build on the foundation it laid.

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• 4. A Shelf of Histories

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  In 1942, Jordan published Men of Substance: Revolutionary Thinkers of 1640. His 1959 book Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 turned to a different subject, the history of charitable giving across nearly two centuries. Later came a two-volume study of the reign of Edward VI, issued in 1968 and 1970 under the title Edward VI: The Threshold of Power. The year after the first Edward VI volume appeared, the British Academy named him a Corresponding Fellow, in 1969.

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• 5. President of Radcliffe

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  In 1943, Jordan was offered the presidency of Scripps College and declined it. He became the fourth president of Radcliffe College instead, and he held the office until 1960. Those years brought dramatic change to the women's college. Jordan promoted closer integration with nearby Harvard University and encouraged a liberal arts curriculum. He was also an early advocate of giving women an education essentially identical to the one men had traditionally received. Among the students who benefited from that philosophy was Natalie Zemon Davis.

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