Herman Vandenburg Ames

Herman Vandenburg Ames.
Herman Vandenburg Ames (1865–1935) was an American legal historian, educator, and document preservationist. He was a professor of constitutional history at the University of Pennsylvania, and the dean of its graduate school for more than two decades. As a doctoral student at Harvard, he studied under the historian Albert Bushnell Hart. Like Hart, Ames spent time in Europe learning German historical methodology; drawing on his studies at the universities of Heidelberg and Leipzig, he later helped establish government archives throughout the United States. His 1897 monograph The Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States During the First Century of Its History was the first exhaustive catalog of such amendments. He also authored John C. Calhoun and the Secession Movement of 1850 and Slavery and the Union 1845–1861, and coauthored The X.Y.Z. Letters. He has been credited with stimulating his student Ezra Pound's lifelong interest in history.