James Westfall Thompson
James Westfall Thompson was an American historian specializing in the history of medieval and early modern Europe, particularly of the Holy Roman Empire and France. He also made noteworthy contributions to the history of literacy, libraries and the book trade in the Middle Ages.
Born to a Dutch reform minister's family in Pella, Iowa, Thompson received an undergraduate degree from Rutgers University in 1892 and a PhD in history from the newly founded University of Chicago in 1895. Thompson remained at Chicago as a professor of history until 1933, when he left for the University of California, Berkeley. He remained at Berkeley until his death in 1941.
Thompson was one of the most prolific academics of his generation and wrote on a wide range of subjects, from the French Revolution to the economic structures of the Carolingian Empire to the history of espionage in early modern Europe. Some of his most important scholarly contributions came from his research on literacy and book collecting. His 1939 book The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages remains a classic study of the subject. Thompson's two-volume study of the social and economic history of medieval Germany, Feudal Germany, appropriated elements of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous Frontier Thesis and applied them to the colonization of Slavic central Europe by German settlers in the Middle Ages.
Thompson served as president of the American Historical Association in 1941, but died before completing his term. His planned presidential address to the Association's annual meeting on the origins of critical historical scholarship in eighteenth-century France was edited by his students and published posthumously in the 1942 edition of the American Historical Review.
He is the namesake of the University of Chicago's Thompson Residence Hall, located in Pierce Tower.
Thompson was married to Anna Hawes Wilmarth in 1897. They had a son, Wilmarth, and an adopted daughter, Frances. They divorced in 1909. Anna later married Harold L. Ickes.
