John Spencer Bassett

The ripe knowledge, cordial good-fellowship and easy conversation of John Spencer Bassett made him a welcome visitor at the Century. He was one of those teachers of history to whose pupils the past becomes as real as the present, and past American history made the strongest appeal to him. During the thirteen years in which he taught at his North Carolina Alma Mater, he established a society which collected and published historical material from all parts of the South and was founder and editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly. In his later instruction at Smith College he became one of the most popular of the institution’s teachers, at the same time completing his admirable Life of Andrew Jackson.

Bassett was a man around whom libraries grew up. It was said that in his spacious residence at Northampton he accumulated one large collection of historical works in his study, another in his attic and a third in his barn, adjoining the garden whose products often graced the table of the Century. It was an appropriate instinct which caused both of the institutions in which he taught to establish historical libraries as a memorial to him.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1929 Century Association Yearbook