William Robert Shepherd was born in Charleston, South Carolina on June 12, 1871.

He is best known for his Historical Atlas, published in several editions during the early twentieth century.

Shepherd's address to the 1909 meeting of the American Historical Association was "probably the first time that a part of the program of the annual meeting was devoted to the history of other peoples in the Americas.

"[2] In his remarks, he decried that in the United States the history of the Western Hemisphere focuses on the English colonies and ignores or disparages the history of Spanish, Portuguese, and French America.

He called for a more balanced history of the Americas, stressing "That the history of the Spanish, Portuguese, and the French in America possesses an interest and a significance of its own, entirely apart from its relation to the 'Anglo-American' element.