Biography

Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814-1901) was born in Boston, Mass. and graduated from Yale in 1832. Under his teacher Josiah Gibbs, he became interested in comparative philology. In 1841, Salisbury was appointed professor of Arabic and Sanskrit at Yale, the first such appointment in the United States, and in 1843, he inaugurated the first formal academic program in Oriental languages, literatures, and history in the United States. Salisbury was a founder of the American Oriental Society (1842) and the Classical Section of the American Oriental Society (1869), which later became the American Philological Association. His first wife died in 1869, and in 1871 he married Evelyn McCurdy. In his later years he devoted most of his energies to genealogical research, publishing Mr. William Diodate (1876); "The Griswold Family of Connecticut" (Magazine of American History [1884]); Family Memorials (2 vols. [1885]), about his own family and that of his first wife; Family Histories and Genealogies (7 vols. [1892]), concerning the family of his second wife; Pedigrees of Newdigate (n.d.); and In Memory of Hon. Charles Johnson McCurdy (1891). He died in New Haven, Connecticut.

Citation:

Benjamin R. Foster. "Salisbury, Edward Elbridge"; http://www.anb.org/articles/09/09-01093.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

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