Lawrence Henry Gipson--author of more than 150 books, articles, and reviews--ranks as one of the leading historians of colonial and revolutionary America. His fifteen-volume The British Empire Before the American Revolution (1936-1970) is characterized by reviewers as "history on a grand scale," "monumental," "magisterial," and "definitive." One reviewer expressed the conviction that the work would "be consulted for a hundred years."

The immersion for a half-century in the intricacies of the eighteenth-century British empire could hardly have been predicted for Gipson. He was born on 7 December 1880 to Albert Eugene and Lina Maria Gipson in Greeley, Colorado, but his family soon moved to Caldwell, Idaho, where young Gipson grew up. His father was a newspaper editor, and Gipson also planned a career in journalism. In his "Reflections," however, Gipson related his early interest in reading history. He recalled having cried at the age of eleven when his sister got a...