Fraternity History & More

In 1899, as a student at Cornell University, Louise Fargo Brown became a member of the Delta chapter of Alpha Phi. Her nickname was “Brownie.” She graduated in 1903 and she returned to her hometown of Buffalo, New York. There she taught history at Lafayette High School, which had just opened. A 1905 Alpha Phi Quarterly reported that “Louise Fargo Brown ‘03 and Alice Brown ‘06 spent the summer at their summer home Point Abino, Lake Erie.”

She then accepted a graduate scholarship in European History and returned to Cornell. While doing graduate work, she went to Toronto “at the request of the General Board and made her enthusiastic report of the would be Alpha Phis there.” Her report was evidently favorable as the Xi chapter of Alpha Phi at the University of Toronto was chartered on December 4, 1906.

Brown won the Andrew White Traveling Fellowship two times and studied in England and Switzerland. The research she undertook on the first trip to Europe resulted in The Religious Factors in the Convention Parliament; it was published in the January 1907 England Historical Review. In the article, Brown stated that “the customary historical assumption that the Presbyterian was the dominant party in the Convention Parliament of Charles II is not warranted.”

She again boarded a ship and traveled to England where she worked on her thesis. The article was published during her stay in London. It caught the eye of William A. Shaw the author of A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth. Shaw was impressed with Brown’s work that he enlisted her assistance in helping to complete some work he had undertaken. Emily Hickman, a member of Brown’s Alpha Phi chapter wrote, “The last letters from England tell of a trip to Oxford and a continuance of her work there and plans for its probable further continuance next year on the Continent. We congratulate not alone Sister Louise but the fraternity as well.”

Brown graduated with her Ph.D. in 1909 and moved to Massachusetts, where she taught history at Wellesley College. In 1911, The Political Activities of the Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men in England During the Interregnum was published. It won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for the best monograph of the year in modern European history.

In 1915, she took a job as professor of history and Dean of Women at the University of Nevada. When World War I broke out she became a Marine Corps sergeant. She served in Washington, D.C., where she did research. She wrote a booklet, The Freedom of the Seas. It was sent to Paris to be used at the Peace Conference. Her obituary noted that “To the delight of her colleagues on the Vassar bridle path, the sergeant’s uniform became the historian’s riding habit.”

After she left DC in 1919, she began her tenure at Vassar College. One of the courses she taught was The History of Tolerance. Brown published two books during this period, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (1933), and Apostle of Democracy: The Life of Lucy Maynard Salmon (1943). She retired in 1944. Men and Centuries of European Civilization, coauthored with George B. Carson, was published in 1948. Brown was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

In 1930, she and Louise Ropes Loomis of Wells College founded the Lakeville History Group which became the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. The organization’s website offers this history:

Although women had been members of the AHA since the nineteenth century, history departments, even at women’s colleges, were dominated by men. In addition, much of the business and conviviality of the historical profession in its early years occurred at hotel ‘smokers,’ private men’s clubs, and an annual retreat held by J. Franklin Jameson in New London, CT. Women were barred from these events, social occasions when graduate students were introduced to prominent colleagues by their mentors. Other forms of exclusion – specifically, women of color who were active in teaching, preservation, and other forms of what we would now call public history – were, unfortunately, not addressed by the founders as they worked to create a place for themselves in the profession.

Brown died on May 1, 1955. The obituary published by Vassar College stated that she was a “lively and spirited member of the college community. She was always a champion of the underdog, and a rugged fighter for the causes in which she believed. At one point she even entered Dutchess County politics and ran for County Court Clerk.”