Andrew Dickson White

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) was born in Homer, New York, graduated from Yale in 1853, and served as an attaché at the American legation in St. Petersburg before returning to teach history at the University of Michigan. In 1865 he secured the charter for Cornell University, built on the then-radical principle that a university's science teaching should answer to no religious authority, and served as its first president from 1868 to 1885. He later served as U.S. minister to Russia and ambassador to Germany, and was a founder and first president of the American Historical Association; History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) drew on decades of research into what he saw as religion's long record of resisting scientific findings it found threatening.