ABSTRACT
Henry Charles Lea, the greatest historian in nineteenth-century America and the most accomplished American historian of medieval Europe before Charles Homer Haskins, was born in Philadelphia on 19 September 1825. His mother, Frances Carey Lea, was a skilled linguist and botanist, the daughter of the Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey and the sister of the political economist and publisher Henry Charles Carey, after whom Lea was named. Lea’s father, Isaac Lea, one of the leading conchologists in North America, was admitted into the Carey publishing house upon his marriage to Frances Carey. The firm passed then to Henry Charles Lea, who converted it to medical and scientific publishing and operated it until his formal retirement in 1880.
