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Harry Harper

American baseball player

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ16002998 ↗
Source-derived summary

Harry Clayton Harper (April 24, 1895 – April 23, 1963) was an American professional baseball pitcher, businessman, and politician. He played in Major League Baseball for the Washington Senators, Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, and Brooklyn Robins between 1913 and 1923. Harper started Game 6 of the 1922 World Series for the Yankees.

Harper was from Hackensack, New Jersey, and was often called "Hackensack Harry" during and after his baseball career. Harper invested his salaries in his business career while he was a baseball player. After retiring from baseball, Harper entered politics, and won election as sheriff of Bergen County as a Republican. He served in the cabinets of Governors Walter Evans Edge and Alfred E. Driscoll, as the Commissioner of Labor and Industry. He also lost elections to the New Jersey Legislature and United States Congress.

Early life

Harper was born on April 24, 1895, in Hackensack, New Jersey, to Elizabeth (née Van Saren) and Henry Clay Harper. He was the second of three sons born to the couple.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Harry Harper” is american baseball player. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Harry, Harper and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1895, 1963, 1913, 1923—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1895-04-24. For this dossier, Harry, Harper and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american baseball player” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16002998. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1963, 1913 and 1923.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Harry Harper”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Harry Harper primary sources, Harry Harper archive and Harry research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Harry Harper”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Harry Harper” 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.