William R. ShepherdWilliam Robert Shepherd was an American geographer and historian who specialized in American and Latin American history. He was born on June 12, 1871 in Charleston, South Carolina and died on June 7, 1934 in Berlin, Germany. Shepherd received his PhDfrom Columbia University in 1896. He then studied in Berlin before becoming a history professor at Columbia University. His most famous work is the Historical Atlas, which was published in multiple versions in the early twentieth century. He is regarded as a pioneer in Latin American history. Shepherd's talk to the American Historical Association in 1909 was "probably the first time that a portion of the annual meeting program was devoted to the history of other peoples in the Americas." In his speech, he criticized the United States for focusing on the English colonies while ignoring or disparaging the history of Spanish, Portuguese, and French America. He advocated for a more balanced history of the Americas, emphasizing "that the history of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French in America possesses an interest and significance of its own, entirely apart from its relationship to the 'Anglo-American' element." Read More Read Less