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= Annie Heloise Abel =

Annie Heloise Abel (February 18, 1873 – March 14, 1947) was one of the earliest professional historians to study Native Americans. She was one of the first thirty women in the United States to earn a PhD in history. One of the ablest historians of her day, Abel was an expert on the history of British and American Indian policies. As another historian has put it: "She was the first academically trained historian in the United States to consider the development of Indian-white relations and, although her focus was narrowly political and her methodology almost entirely archival-based, in this she was a pioneer."

Early Life and Education [edit]
Annie Heloise Abel was born at Fernhurst, Sussex, England. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1885, following her parents who were settling in Salina, Kansas for the second time. Her father worked as a gardener and her mother ran a small family farm. Abel attended Salina High School, graduating in 1893. She immediately began teaching in the Kansas public schools. In 1895, Abel began studies at the University of Kansas, where her undergraduate studies were free. After two years of high school teaching, she attended the University of Kansas for her M.A. in History. Under the direction of Kansas historian Frank Haywood Hodder, Abel wrote an M.A. thesis entitled: "Indian Reservations in Kansas and the Extinguishment of Their Title." Based on that work, her Kansas advisor there recommended her for PhD coursework at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and Abel began her studies there in 1900. After her potential advisor, Moses Coit Tyler, died, she decided to leave Cornell, and return to Kansas. To pay for graduate tuition, she returned to teaching high school from 1901 to 1903.

In 1903, with the encouragement of Kansas faculty, Abel applied for a Bulkley Scholarship in American History to fund her PhD degree at Yale. When her sister, Rosa Abel, begin PhD work in English Literature at Yale, Abel moved to New Haven to take up her studies at Yale University. She intended to focus on Native Americans and U.S. Indian policy, a topic no professional historians had researched in detail.

At Yale, Abel studied with Dr. Edward Gaylord Bourne. She was the first person to use and analyze Indian Office records to understand federal policy and the idea of Indian Removal. Her dissertation, entitled “The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi,” was published in the Annual Report (1907) of the American Historical Association. It became the standard work on federal policies resulting in Indian Removal. Her thorough research of Indian Office and congressional records became a model for the first generation of scholars to criticize those policies.

Professional Achievements
The American Historical Association awarded her the Justin Winsor Prize in 1906 for her early work. That prize, created by the American Historical Association to recognize the best manuscript in the history of the Western Hemisphere, made Annie Abel an authority on national Indian policy. Because only teaching colleges or women's colleges would hire women, it took her some years to find full time academic work. Abel served briefly as the Historian for the U.S. Indian office and taught part-time at Goucher College, a women's college outside of Washington, DC. She became active in local suffrage politics after she became a citizen in 1910. She was hired as a faculty member at Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts in 1908 and spent 12 years teaching there, moving up the academic ladder.

She married George Cockburn Henderson, an Australian historian, in October 1922, in Adelaide, Australia. The following year he had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized in June 1923; at his insistence Annie returned to the United States.[8] The marriage was later dissolved.[9] During the 1924–1925 school year Abel taught history at Sweet Briar College in Aberdeen, Washington. Her parents and several siblings had settled in southwest Washington state in the 1910s where logging and fishing had brought a booming population. After she received the Alice Freeman Palmer traveling fellowship awardedby the American Association of University Women in 1925, she resumed her intensive research in England and Australia.

In 1928 Abel-Henderson was appointed professor of history at the University of Kansas. She left after only one semester when she received a two-year research grant from the Social Science Research Council. That funded enabled her to travel to Canada, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, Missouri, and to continue her studies on British policies toward the Australian aborigines. During this time she also edited documents of Francis A. Chardon, a fur trader who had traveled among the American Indians on the Upper Missouri from 1834 to 1839. She also edited a manuscript on the 1803–1805 Loisel expedition, Tabeau’s Narrative of Loisel’s Expedition to the Upper Missouri, which was published in 1939.

Working with the British-American War Relief Association in Seattle, Abel-Henderson founded a chapter of the Daughters of the British Empire following the war. In 1946 the British government decorated her for her work.Annie continued her work, traveling as needed to pursue research in Canada and England before retiring to Aberdeen, WA in the 1930s.[3]

In the 1930s, she retired to Aberdeen, Washington, but continued her scholarship by receiving foundation and library study awards. She wrote ?? books in the 1930s, but turned her attention to publishing valuable accounts of western travel, the fur trade, and Indian policy that she had unearthed in her research. She died of cancer in 1947, and was buried with her parents and sisters in Montesano Washington. When Abel died, she had two books in progress.

Works[edit]
Historians consider her most important work to be the three-volume The Slave Holding Indians, but she also found, edited, and published numerous crucial primary documents about the U.S. West, Indian Policy and the fur trade. At her death, she was preparing a comparative history of women's suffrage in Australia and the United States. Her works include:


 * Her master's thesis: "Indian Reservations in Kansas and the Extinguishment of Their Title.
 * Abel, Annie Heloise, 1873-1947. The History of Events Resulting In Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1908.
 * Abel, Annie Heloise, 1873-1947: The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War (first book of the Slaveholding Indians series; Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1915) (multiple formats at archive.org)
 * Abel, Annie Heloise, 1873-1947: The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist (second book of the Slaveholding Indians series; 1919) (Gutenberg text and illustrated HTML)
 * Abel, Annie Heloise, 1873-1947: The American Indian Under Reconstruction (last book of the Slaveholding Indians series; Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1925) (multiple formats at archive.org)
 * Abel, Annie Heloise, 1873-1947, ed.: (Pierre, SD: Pub. under the auspices of L. K. Fox, Dept. of History, State of South Dakota, 1932),  by Francis A. Chardon (page images at HathiTrust)

Abel's papers may be found in the repository of Washington State University Libraries, in Pullman, WA. The collection includes notes, correspondence, newspaper clippings, manuscripts and other printed materials related to native policies of several English-speaking countries, as well as other historical subjects such as Russian history and women's suffrage. The collection is open for research use.[10]