page_title: Herman Vandenburg Ames
section_title: Education
hierarchical_section_title: Herman Vandenburg Ames / Early life / Education
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the Amherst College Delta Upsilon house on South Pleasant Street, purchased by the fraternity in 1882 (photo c. 1890). The fraternity had a new house constructed in a different location in 1915, and Amherst College bought the property in 1917. The house was removed and Hitchcock Road now runs through the middle of this plot.
context_page_description: Herman Vandenburg Ames was an American legal historian, educator, and archivist long associated with the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor of United States constitutional history and, from 1907 to 1928, dean of its graduate school. His 1897 monograph, The Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States During the First Century of Its History, was a landmark work in American constitutional history. Other works by Ames included John C. Calhoun and the Secession Movement of 1850, Slavery and the Union 1845–1861, and The X.Y.Z. Letters, the latter of which he authored with John Bach McMaster. Among his notable students were Ezra Pound, John Musser, and Herbert Eugene Bolton.
  A member of the Ames family, Herman Ames was born in Massachusetts and educated at Amherst College. He received his doctorate from Harvard University, where he was the Ozias Goodwin Memorial Fellow in Constitutional and International Law, and studied under Albert Bushnell Hart. Like Hart, Ames spent time in Europe learning German historical methodology and was influenced in his own research by its approach.
context_section_description: Ames was educated at the Mowry and Goff School in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduating, he enrolled at Brown University before transferring to Amherst College, where he was initiated into the Delta Upsilon fraternity and later became the chapter president. During the Delta Upsilon convention of 1887, Ames played a central role in resolving an intra-fraternity dispute concerning the authority by which the Executive Council of Delta Upsilon had admitted the DePauw University chapter some months earlier. As a student at Amherst, he was particularly influenced by Anson D. Morse, whom he credited with cultivating in him "a judicial attitude in the study of history", years later recalling that he had "never come in contact with a teacher who was so judicially minded".
  Ames graduated from Amherst with an A.B. degree in 1888, and thereafter entered Harvard University. At Harvard he received an A.M. in 1890 and a Ph.D. the following year for his dissertation The Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, which was done under the supervision of Albert Bushnell Hart. During his time at Harvard, he was
  the Ozias Goodwin Memorial Fellow in Constitutional and International Law.
  Between 1891 and 1894, Ames lectured in history at the University of Michigan under an appointment as acting assistant professor to fill a vacancy created by the resignation of J.H.T. McPherson. Though his interest was in U.S. history, at Michigan Ames was charged with teaching courses covering a variety of periods of world history, an assignment to which he would admit he was "not particularly prepared", but he resigned himself to the idea that "one must make a beginning somewhere, and this was the opening offered". He later recalled this first teaching experience "was a valuable one to me, far more so, I fear, than to the students taught. I was afforded the opportunity to become acquainted with the life and work of the leading state university of the time".
  Ames spent 1895 abroad, taking advanced studies in history at Leipzig University and Heidelberg University. During his fifteen months in Europe, he also undertook a grand tour.
caption: Herman Ames was initiated into Delta Upsilon at Amherst College, whose chapter house is shown here at about the time he was its president.
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