Ripley
Ripley names 2 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Ripley WILLIAM ZEBINA, an American economist
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
WILLIAM ZEBINA, an American economist, born at Medford, Mass., in 1867. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Columbia University. From 1895 to 1901 he was a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1901 he became professor of political economy at Harvard University. He lectured on sociology at Columbia University from 1893 to 1901; served as expert agent on transportation with the United States Industrial Commission, in 1900-1; and was the Huxley memorial lecturer at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, England, in 1908. He was a member of numerous American and foreign scientific societies and twice vice-president of the American Economic Association. During the World War he served in the War Department as administrator of labor standards for army clothing, and in 1919 was chairman of the National Adjustment Commission of the United States Shipping Board. He published, besides many articles in peri- History of Virginia" (1890); "The Races of Europe" (1900); "Trusts, Pools and Corporations" (1905); "Railway Problems" (1907); "Railroads: Rates and Regulation" (1912); "Railroads - Finance and Organization" (1914); "Special Report U. S. Eight-Hour Commission Trainmen's Schedules and Agreeon ments" (1917). He also edited "Selections and Documents in Economics," in 10 volumes.
Ripley GEORGE, an American author
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
GEORGE, an American author; born in Greenfield, Mass., Oct. 3, 1802; educated at Harvard University and Cambridge Divinity School; became a Unitarian minister in Boston; lived some years in Europe; was one of the founders of the Transcendental magazine, the "Dial" (on which he had Emerson and Margaret Fuller as coadjutors); and the originator and conductor of the communistic experiment at Brook Farm. He became literary editor of the New York "Tribune" in 1849, and was joint-editor with Charles A. Dana of the "American Cyclopædia" (1858-1863, 16 vols., also of the second edition). He died in New York City, July 4, 1880.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote in 1921, William Z. Ripley was a living Harvard economist; the years after were his most consequential. In 1926-27 he warned in "Main Street and Wall Street" that pyramided holding companies and non-voting stock were rotting American corporate finance, a critique widely credited as anticipating the 1929 crash and feeding into New Deal securities regulation; he died in 1941. His other famous book, "The Races of Europe" (1899), which sorted Europeans into Teutonic, Alpine and Mediterranean types, is now rejected by anthropologists and is chiefly studied as a source for the racial thinking of Madison Grant and others. The sketch of George Ripley, dead since 1880, needs no correction, though Brook Farm is now read less as a "communistic experiment" than as the central social venture of New England Transcendentalism.
Written for this edition, 2026.