George and Elizabeth Peckham
American married couple; teachers, taxonomists, ethologists, arachnologists, and entomologists
George Williams Peckham (March 23, 1845 – January 10, 1914) and Elizabeth Maria Gifford Peckham (December 19, 1854 – February 11, 1940) were a married couple who were early American teachers, taxonomists, ethologists, arachnologists, and entomologists, specializing in animal behavior and in the study of jumping spiders (family Salticidae) and wasps.
Lives and careers
George Peckham was born in Albany, New York in 1845. At age 18, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in the American Civil War, reaching the rank of first lieutenant. After the war, he resumed his studies, obtaining a law degree from Albany Law School in 1867. After graduation, George worked at the law office of James T. Brown of Milwaukee. Not caring for the law, however, he became a student in the medical college of the University of Michigan, earning his M.D. in 1872. Rather than practice medicine, however, he chose to teach biology at East Division High School of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1880, he organized the first American biological laboratory program in any high school, and in same year he married his colleague, Elizabeth Maria Gifford, one of the first science graduates from Vassar. In 1888, Peckham became principal of East Division, and in 1891, an inspector for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. He also served during this period as president of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
“George and Elizabeth Peckham” enters the record as american married couple; teachers, taxonomists, ethologists, arachnologists, and entomologists. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what George, Elizabeth and Peckham can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “George and Elizabeth Peckham” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.