William Hickling Prescott

William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, into a prosperous family; a college accident left him nearly blind in one eye and increasingly unable to use the other, and for most of his working life he had his research read aloud to him and dictated his own drafts to an assistant. Working almost entirely from original Spanish-language archival sources gathered for him in Europe, he became the first major American historian of Spain's conquests in the Americas, publishing History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), both written in a vivid, dramatic narrative style that made them widely popular well beyond scholarly circles. He died in Boston at sixty-two.