Field
Field names 7 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Field Eugene, an American journalist and author
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Eugene, an American journalist and author. Born at St. Louis September 3, 1850. He spent a year as a student in Williams College, a second year at Knox College, and a third year in Columbia Missouri College. A friend who recalls his sophomore year at Knox describes him as careless of dress and fond of pranks, long hair, poetry, old books, and a corncob pipe. After six months in Europe, 1872, Field served successively as a reporter, editor, and managing editor on several papers in St. Joseph, St. Louis, Kansas City , and Denver. In 1883 he came to Chicago as a free lance on the News, which was later known as the Record. In 1889 he made a second trip to Europe. He died in Chicago November 4, 1895. As a newspaper writer he had a keen sense of the ludicrous and laid on unsparingly wherever he suspected corruption or hypocrisy. Field was fond of practical jokes. In 1874, while touring in Missouri to report the political meetings addressed by Carl Schurz, he was requested, in the absence of the presiding officer, to introduce Mr. Schurz, which he proceeded to do in a chest tone as follows: Ladies and Chentlemens: I have such a sereve cold dot I cannot make me a speedg tonight, but I haf die bleasure of to introduce to you my prilliant young chournalistic gompanion, Mr. Eucheene Fielt, who will spheak in my blace. Quite a circle of booklovers were apt to gather in the rare book corner of McClurg's bookstore, especially upon the receipt of a lot of rarities from Europe. Field was the life of the circle, and took to publishing the sayings of "The Saints and Sinners Club," as he called them in his "Sharps and Flats" column of the News. As the years went by and Field began to gather reputation as a writer of verse, he was fond of surprising these cherished friends with a new poem. On New Year's Eve, 1891, he sent each member of the circle an invitation to meet in The Saints and Sinners' corner to watch the old year out. At the critical moment when "church yards yawn," he unexpectedly turned off the gas, leaving the store in deepest darkness; then, lighting a feeble candle, he proceeded to read his little audience an inimitable booklover's poem, "Dibdin's Ghost," newly written for the occasion. No one-volume edition of Field's poems is to be had. A Little Book of Western Verse, A Little Book of Profitable Tales, and A Second Book of Verse, probably rank in the order named. Little Boy Blue is perhaps his most popular poem, though the volumes named contain many lullabies and poems that appeal to all lovers of wife, home, and children. Talent, education, friends, books, and the untrammeled training of newspaper life combined to make Eugene Field a successful man of letters. An American of Americans, much of his verse was devoted to the celebration of what we may call the minor joys which go to make social happiness in the life he lived with so frank and rounded a completion. . . . He takes his America with just the same heartiness as his nonsense land; . . . We find the same honest resolve to accept the rules and to play out the game accordingly; the same conviction, that the game is in itself a good one, well worth the playing.--Kenneth Grahame. Eugene Field will always be remembered as the poet of child-life. Eugene Field won the hearts of "grown-ups" as well as children with his humorous, tender, dainty, and fantastic little songs.--J. W. Abernethy.
Field DAVID DUDLEY, an American jurist
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
DAVID DUDLEY, an American jurist; born in Haddam, Conn., Feb. 13, 1805; was admitted to the New York distinbar in 1828; practiced till 1885, guishing himself especially by his labors of the juin the direction of a reform diciary system. In 1857 he was apdic pointed by the State to prepare a politicivil, and penal code, of which the cal, civil, last was adopted by New York, and all have been accepted by some other States. In 1866, by a proposal brought before the British Social Science Congress, he procured the appointment of a committee of jurists from the principal nations to prepare the outlines of an international code, which were presented in a report This to the same congress in 1873. movement resulted in the formation of an association for the reform of the law of nations, and for the substitution of arbitration for war, of which Mr. Field was the first president. He died in New York City, April 13, 1894.
Field CYRUS WEST, an American capitalist
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
CYRUS WEST, an American capitalist; born in Stockbridge, Mass., Nov. 30, 1819; received a fair CYRUS WEST FIELD education; began the manufacture and sale of paper in 1840, and soon became wealthy. About 1845 he turned his attention to ocean telegraphy. In 1854 the Newfoundland Le Legislature granted cables him the right for 50 years to land between the United States and Europe on that island. He later organized the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, of which Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts, and Chandler White were members. In 1866, after many disappointments and failures, a cable was successfully stretched across the ocean (see ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH). For his achievement Congress voted him a gold medal and the thanks of the people. In 1867 the Grand Medal, the highest honor of the Paris Exposition, was bestowed on him. He died in New York City, July 12, 1892.
Field STEPHEN JOHNSON, an American jurist
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
STEPHEN JOHNSON, an American jurist; born in Haddam, Conn., Nov. 4, 1816; brother of Cyrus West Field; was graduated at Williams College in 1837; studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1841; and removed to San Francisco in 1849. He was elected to the first legislature under the California constitution, in the autumn of 1850; prepared a code of mining, civil and criminal laws, which was generally adopted in the Western States; became a justice of the Supreme Court of California in 1857; was appointed its chiefjustice in 1859; and in 1863 was appointed an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, which office he resigned in April, 1897. He died in Washington, D. C., April 9, 1899. See AR- FIELD ARTILLERY. TILLERY. an English
Field HENRY MARTYN, an American clergyman and scholar
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
HENRY MARTYN, an American clergyman and scholar; born in Stockbridge, Mass., April 3, 1822; brother of Cyrus West and Stephen Johnson Field; was graduated at Williams College, and was ordained to the ministry in 1842. In 1854 he became editor and proprietor of the New York "Evangelist." He was a lifelong traveler. Among his work are: "Summer " Pictures from Copenhagen to Venice (1859); "History of the Atlantic Telegraph" (1866); "From Egypt to Japan" (1878); "On the Desert" (1883); "Among the Holy Hills" (1883); "Our Western Archipelago"; "The Barbary Coast"; "Old Spain and New Spain"; "The Story of the Atlantic Cable." He died in 1907.
Field EUGENE, an American journalist
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
EUGENE, an American journalist; born in St. Louis, Mo., Sept. 2, 1850. By his poems and tales in the press he won a high reputation in the West. His complete works comprise: "Love Songs of Childhood," "A Little Book of Western Verse," "A Second Book of Verse," "The Holy Cross, and Other Tales," "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac." He made, in collaboration with his brother, Roswell Martin Field, some good translations from Horace - "Echoes from the Sabine Farm." He died in Chicago, Ill., Nov. 4, 1895.
Field KATE, an American author and lecturer
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
KATE, an American author and lecturer; born in St. Louis, Mo., about 1840. During several years she was European correspondent of the New York "Tribune" and other journals. She founded "Kate Field's Washington" (1889), in Washington, D. C. Among "Planchette's books (1868); "Ten Days in Spain" (1875); "History of Bell's Telephone"; "Life of Fechter," etc. She died in Honolulu, Hawaii, May 19, 1896.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Four of the men here are the Field brothers of Haddam and Stockbridge and one Chicago newspaperman, and the century has sorted them unevenly. Aiton's complaint in 1910 that "no one-volume edition of Field's poems is to be had" was soon answered by collected editions, and Chicago put up a memorial fountain to him in Lincoln Park in 1922, but Eugene Field is no longer the household "poet of child-life" the entry assumed he would always be; only Little Boy Blue and Wynken, Blynken and Nod are still widely recognised. Stephen Johnson Field, described flatly as "an American jurist," turned out to matter most in the long run: he sat on the United States Supreme Court from 1863 to 1897, a tenure record that stood until William O. Douglas passed it, and his opinions on the Fourteenth Amendment shaped decades of American economic law. His brother David Dudley Field's procedural code was adopted by many states and still underlies modern civil procedure, while Cyrus West Field's 1866 achievement has been utterly superseded, telegraph cable giving way to the first transatlantic telephone cable in 1956, then to satellites and to fibre optics from 1988.
Written for this edition, 2026.