William Stearns Davis

This faculty for humanizing, even dramatizing, history characterized Davis' later academic and professional writings as well, making them particularly suitable for secondary and higher education during the first half of the twentieth century in a field which, according to one editor, had "lost the freshness and robustness .

Due both to childhood illnesses and to family moves occasioned by his father's call to new congregations, Davis was largely educated at home until he entered Worcester Academy in 1895.

He now turned this experience and his desire to humanize history to writing historical novels, the first of which, A Friend of Caesar, was published in the year he graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

[8] He retired from teaching in 1927, moving back to New England and taking up residence in Exeter, New Hampshire, with the intention of devoting all of his time to writing.

For his historical fiction, he chose subjects with dramatic flavor, such as the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, the coming to power of Julius Caesar, Leo the Isaurian's defense of Constantinople, the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and the start of the American Revolution.

Stylistically, they use narrative of the kind which Josephine Tey called "history-with-conversation",[9] and his earliest novels have some of the attributes of scholarly publication, including meticulous (and copious) footnotes or appendices.

His 1910 work on wealth and money in first-century Rome begins with an almost journalistic daily-weekly narrative of bank failures and trading house suspensions leading to a financial panic in 33 AD[11] (which must have read all too familiarly to those who had just weathered the 1907 crash).

[12] Among his last works, Europe Since Waterloo (and all the revisions based upon it) begins with a narrative picture of Napoleon on the deck of the British man-o'-war transporting him to his final exile in St.

[13] Forty years later, Kurt Schmeller, producing the latest revision of that work, would say that he "sought to retain the powerful and dramatic narrative of earlier editions",[14] and Theodore H. Von Laue's foreword to the same edition would cite Davis' "forceful, lively, and down-to-earth style" as a motive to retain the core of a work then moving towards a half-century of use.

He was a forceful advocate of military preparedness in the years leading up to World War I, for which he was duly criticized in the widely pacifistic feeling of the times (see for example the 1916 exchange of letters in The Survey).

A particularly outspoken critic, C. Hartley Gratton, said of Davis' CPI efforts and of his 1918 The Roots of the War that there was "free use of gossip, and the 'revelations' of the Creel Bureau are accepted as definitive truth".

[18] Davis himself would write in 1926 of the earlier work that "very little of [that] hastily prepared material has endured under the cold scrutiny demanded by added information and years of retrospect.".

Blakey sums up the revisionists' efforts by saying that, however they changed the practice of historical writing, "their impact on the subsequent lives and careers of the embattled historians was slight to the point of being negligible,"[20] and this could apply fairly to Davis.

Throughout his writing career, both of fiction and non-fiction, Davis' "angle" to history, as he himself put it in his preface to Europe Since Waterloo, included: "a belief in a just form of nationalism, and that a devoted loyalty to native land is entirely reconcilable with an ardent love for wide humanity.

a matured belief that only as the spirit of Christianity penetrates the hearts of men will human brotherhood and wide-spread, enduring happiness be achieved .