One of the first generation of professionally trained historians in the United States, a prolific author and editor of historical works, Albert Bushnell Hart became, as Samuel Eliot Morison described him, "The Grand Old Man" of American history, looking the part with his "patriarchal full beard and flowing moustaches.

"[1] Hart was born in Clarksville, Pennsylvania (now known as Clark), and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, graduating from West High School in 1870.

[5] Hart edited, along with Edward Channing, over the period from 1892 to 1895 a series of extracts from primary documents called the "American history leaflets; colonial and constitutional", which included titles such as "Extracts from the Sagas describing the voyages to Vinland", and "Documents illustrating the territorial development of the United States, 1584–1774".

Hart authored Formation of the Union (1892), Salmon Portland Chase (1899), Essentials of American History (1905), Slavery and Abolition (1906), and many other books.

Though a believer in the racial inferiority of African Americans, he nevertheless opposed plans to deny black students places in the Freshman Halls at Harvard in the years following World War I.

[8] A proponent of U.S. participation in World War I, he was accused of espionage in December 1918, but the charges were determined to be the work of German propagandists trying to undermine his pro-British stance.

[16]Hart wrote the entry on "Lynching" in Cyclopedia of American Government (1914), where he referred to it as "not simply extra-legal but anti-legal.

Hart wrote Herman Hagedorn of the Association: "What we are after is the crisp, sharp, biting sparks that flew from the Roosevelt brain."

Hart told the survivors of the Harvard Class of 1880 that editing the cyclopedia "will be a very interesting and agreeable service to the memory of our great classmate."

It appeared in 1941 as The Theodore Roosevelt Cyclopedia, edited by Albert Bushnell Hart and Herbert Ronald Ferleger.

("How to Study History", in Studies in American Education, 1895) "For all the weary hours spent over bibliographies and source books and textbooks, at the end of fifty years I have the satisfaction of believing that I was one of a group of young men who made history and government vital subjects for college and graduate school."

(Harvard College Class of 1880, Fiftieth Anniversary Report, 1930) "I believe that the best thing for the happiness of American and of other people is for us to remain within our present boundaries, and give our strength to governing ourselves well.