Bartlett, JOHN RUSSELL

Bartlett, JOHN RUSSELL, American author, was born at Providence, Rhode Island, U.S., 23d October 1805. For a time in a banking-house there, in 1837 he became a bookseller in New York, giving his leisure to history and ethnology. He assisted in founding the American Ethnological Society, and was secretary of the New York Historical Society. He was employed by the United States government in 1850-53 as a commissioner for determining the Mexican boundary-line, and in 1854 published an account of his explorations and adventures in that capacity. In 1855 he became Secretary of State of Rhode Island, and in 1861-62 he was its acting governor. He was the author of The Progress of Ethnology, a Dictionary of Americanisms (enlarged ed. 1878), Primeval Man (1868), Bibliotheca Americana (4 vols. 1865-70), &c. He died 28th May 1886.