# James Axtell

James L. Axtell (December 20, 1941 - August 29, 2023) was an American historian. He was a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Axtell, whose interests lie in American Indian history and the history of higher education, was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. Axtell retired at the end of the spring 2008 semester, although he taught a class at Princeton University in the fall of 2009.

## Early life and education

Axtell was born in Endicott, New York on December 20, 1941 to Laura England and Arthur James Axtell, partners in a small accounting firm. In 1946, Axtell's parents divorced, and he moved with his father to his grandparents' small farm in Sidney, New York, where his father remarried in 1948.
Axtell attended Sidney Central High School, graduating in 1959, and was recruited to Yale University to play basketball. He switched to track and field as a freshman and set school records in the indoor long-jump and outdoor triple-jump. Axtell graduated from Yale in 1963, having also attended the Oxford International Summer School the previous year. He then began pursuing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he once again participated in athletics, breaking Cambridge's long-jump record and being chosen for the All-England university basketball team due to his high scoring on the Cambridge team. Axtell later claimed he had finished his dissertation in only two years to avoid having to guard Bill Bradley on the Oxford team the following year. He earned his PhD in 1967, and his dissertation on “The Educational Writings of John Locke” was published the following year by Cambridge University Press.

## Books

* James Axtell (January 1968). The Educational Writings of John Locke: A Critical Edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-04073-6.
* James Axtell (January 1976). The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-01723-5.
* James Axtell and James P. Ronda (January 1978). Indian Missions: A Critical Bibliography. Indiana University Press-The Newberry Library. ISBN 0-253-32978-7.
* James Axtell (February 1981). The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502741-8.
* James Axtell (January 1982). The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502904-6.
* James Axtell (January 1986). The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504154-2.: History Book Club; Gilbert Chinard Prize, Society for French Historical Studies, 1985; Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize, American Society for Ethnohistory, 1986; Albert B. Corey Prize, American Historical Association-Canadian Historical Association, 1986
* James Axtell (1988). After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505376-1.
* James Axtell (January 1992). Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-506838-6.
* James Axtell (July 1997). The Indians' New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0-8071-2172-X.
* James Axtell (September 1998). The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration & Defense of Higher Education. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-1049-3.
* James Axtell (August 2000). Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513771-X.
* James Axtell (April 2006). The Making of Princeton University: Woodrow Wilson to the Present. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-12686-0.
* Wisdom′s Workshop. The Rise of the Modern University. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 2016, ISBN 978-1-4008-8042-3.