13 Facts About Isaiah Bowman

Isaiah Bowman's family was Mennonite and of Swiss descent, and, at the age of eight weeks, Bowman's father moved his family to a log cabin in Brown City, Michigan, sixty miles north of Detroit.

In 1900, Isaiah became an American citizen and began intensive study to prepare himself for admittance to Harvard.

Isaiah Bowman sailed for France in December 1918 as Chief Territorial Specialist, but he quickly assumed an administrative role as well, gaining the ear of President Woodrow Wilson and his chief adviser, Colonel Edward House.

Isaiah Bowman thus played a major role in determining distribution of land areas and national borders, especially in the Balkans, as part of the Paris Peace Conference.

Isaiah Bowman directed the American Geographical Society until 1935, when he was named the fifth president of the Johns Hopkins University, succeeding Joseph Sweetman Ames.

Isaiah Bowman inherited a growing deficit due to the Great Depression and he began working to reduce the deficit and build the university's endowment.

Isaiah Bowman presided over Hopkins' return to a peacetime status, planning for the influx of ex-military personnel as they returned to civilian status and resumed their education.

Isaiah Bowman was briefly successful, but the Isaiah Bowman School of Geography was never able to attract a high-profile scholar to give it the prestige it needed.

Isaiah Bowman retired from the Hopkins presidency at the end of 1948, and died just over a year later.

Isaiah Bowman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1916, the American Philosophical Society in 1923, and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1930.

Isaiah Bowman's team looked for uninhabited or sparsely settled land on five continents, but not in the US.

Isaiah Bowman was a known anti-Semite: extremely suspect of Jews and reluctant to hire them at the university.

Archival research of private letters reveals Bowman intensely disliked the only tenured geography professor at Harvard, Derwent S Whittlesey, for his scholarship and homosexuality.