Charles Henry Oldfather

Charles Henry Oldfather ( born June 13, 1887 in Tabriz in Persia; † August 20, 1954 in Lincoln, Nebraska) was an American classical scholar and historian, who worked from 1926 to 1951 as Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nebraska.

Life

Charles Henry Oldfather was born in Persia, where his parents Jeremiah M. Oldfather and Felicia Narcissa (born Rice) were Presbyterian missionaries. His older brother was the philologist William Abbott Oldfather ( 1880-1945 ).

Oldfather studied in the USA at Hanover College, where he graduated in 1906 the bachelor's degree. Then he went to the McCormick Theological Seminary and acquired in 1911 the title of Doctor of Divinity (DD). To further his studies, he was like his brother before him to Europe at the University of Munich ( 1911/1912 ). He received his first job as a lecturer at the English Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. 1914 Oldfather returned back to the U.S. and started working on small, private colleges: until 1916 as a professor of Classics at Hanover College, from 1916 as a professor of Greek philology and ancient history at Wabash College in Indiana. At the University of Wisconsin -Madison in 1922 was made with the dissertation The Greek Literary Papyri from Greco - Roman Egypt: A Study PhD in the History of Civilization to the Ph. D..

His position in life was Oldfather at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where he was professor of Ancient History from 1926. From 1929 to 1949 he was also Chairman of the Historical Institute. In 1951, he retired; a year later he was also from the Dean of the College of Arts and Science, a position he held since 1931.

Since September 7, 1914 Oldfather was married to Margaret Kinsey McLelland.

Services

Oldfather was by training, although more classical philologist, but made especially in the history and in the university administration deserves. During his long deanship at the University of Nebraska he had to deal with the impediments of the Great Depression and the Second World War to fight. In his honor, was the university building, in which the Dean's Office and numerous teaching facilities of the College of Arts and Science are renamed Oldfather Hall.

In his research, Oldfather dealt particularly with the Greek historians. His greatest work is the bilingual edition of the writings of Diodorus, which appeared in the Loeb Classical Library from 1933. Oldfather presented until his death six volumes completed; the complete edition includes a further six volumes today.