Once Upon a Time in Quincy: Quincy historian was a graceful writer
Adams County was home to at least two historians of national eminence. One was Allan Nevins of Columbia University. Nevins was a Camp Point, Ill., native who twice won the Pulitzer Prize and wrote a multi-volume history of the Civil War and its prologue. The other was Marshall Smelser, a graduate of Quincy High School and Quincy College. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard under the direction of Samuel Eliot Morison, a Pulitzer Prize historian of maritime and American history. Smelser taught at the University of Notre Dame for almost three decades. Smelser belonged to the Quincy family known for i...
Source: whig.com