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Marsh, George Perkins Marsh, George Perkins, 1801–82, American diplomat and scholar, b. Woodstock, Vt., grad. Dartmouth (1820). He was admitted to the bar in 1825 and began practicing law in Burlington, Vt. A member of the governor's council (1835), he was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Whig in 1843. Resigning in 1849, he became minister to Turkey (1849–53) President Lincoln named the first American minister to Italy in 1861, a post he held until his death. Marsh, who helped found the Smithsonian Institution, was an erudite scholar, a remarkable linguist, and an authority on philology and etymology, and is regarded by many as America's first environmentalist. His published work includes A Compendious Grammar of the Old-Northern or Icelandic Language (1838), The Goths in New England (1843), The Camel … Considered with Reference to His Introduction into the United States (1856), Lectures on the English Language (1860), The Origin and History of the English Language (1862), Man and Nature (1865, rev. 1874 as The Earth as Modified by Human Action), and Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles (1876). Bibliography See C. Marsh, his second wife, Life and Letters of George Perkins Marsh (1888); biography by D. Lowenthal (2000). Marsh, George Perkins(1801–82) linguist, diplomat, conservationist; born in Woodstock, Vt. A master of several languages by the time he graduated from Dartmouth (1820), he taught before shifting to the law (1825); with a prosperous practice in Burlington, Vt., he entered politics, eventually serving in the U.S. House of Representatives (Whig, Vt.; 1843–49), where he opposed slavery and the Mexican War. He resigned to serve as ambassador to Turkey (1849–54). He had continued his studies of various languages, such as Icelandic, and as an ambassador was noted for his ability to converse with foreigners in many languages. Back in Vermont he pursued a variety of interests—writing a book on introducing the camel into the U.S.A. (1856) and lecturing and publishing on the history of the English language. In 1861 he went off to the new kingdom of Italy as first American ambassador, a post he held with great respect until he died in Italy in 1882. While there he published Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864); it was heavily revised and republished as The Earth as Modified by Human Action (1874). Although it did not receive much attention in its day, it was rediscovered in the 1930s, and with its thesis that humans have abused the land and must therefore restore it, it has come to be regarded as "the fountainhead of the conservation movement." |