Belknap Press

Endowed by Waldron Phoenix Belknap Jr. (1899-1949), a banker, architect, and scholar of eighteenth-century American painting, who left Harvard University Press roughly a million dollars — part of it in as-yet-unvalued Texas oil land — to publish source material on the colonial and federal periods.¹ The Press inaugurated the imprint in May 1954 with the Harvard Guide to American History; Belknap's mother, Rey Hutchings Belknap, added her own fortune to the fund a decade later.²