James Turner (historian)
American intellectual historian (born 1946)
James Crewdson Turner (born June 25, 1946) is an intellectual historian and Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. After receiving his PhD from Harvard University in 1975, he taught at the College of Charleston (1975–1977), the University of Massachusetts Boston (1977–1984), and the University of Michigan (1984–1995) before moving to Notre Dame.
In 1980, James authored Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind, which documented the history of animal welfare that emerged in Britain during the early 19th-century and spread to the United States after the Civil War.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “James Turner (historian)” as american intellectual historian (born 1946). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american intellectual historian (born 1946). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22073913. VIAF identifies the subject as 109293256. The Library of Congress control number is n80056442. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1975, 1977 and 1984.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. 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.
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Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
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- Building a first chronology
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “James Turner (historian)” 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.