Hubert Howe Bancroft

Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832–1918) was an American historian and publisher. Born in Ohio, he went to California in 1852 and built the largest bookselling and publishing business on the Pacific coast. From the 1860s he collected every book, manuscript, newspaper and map he could find on western North America, and with a staff of assistants produced The Native Races of the Pacific States (1874–76) and the thirty-four volumes of his History of the Pacific States, covering Mexico, Central America and the American West. His library of some sixty thousand items was bought by the University of California in 1905 and is now the Bancroft Library at Berkeley.