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Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions

Open-knowledge reference entry

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ7199081 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions was established at the University of Cambridge on 5 February 1944 from a sum of £44,000 received from the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press in 1943 and augmented by a further £5,000 in 1946. The title of the chair was changed to the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions in 1951.

The professorship is unusual in that tenure is for a period of one year only.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions” is open-knowledge reference entry. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Pitt, Professor and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1944, 1943, 1946, 1951—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Pitt, Professor and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “open-knowledge reference entry” 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 citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7199081. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1943, 1946 and 1951.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. 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

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions primary sources, Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions archive and Pitt 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

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions” 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.