Appletons cyclopedia of biography

Collection of biographies of notable people involved in the history of the New World

Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography is a six-volume collection of biographies of notable people involved in the history of the New World.

Published between 1887 and 1889, its unsigned articles were widely accepted as authoritative for several decades. Later the encyclopedia became notorious for including dozens of biographies of people who had never existed. In nearly all articles about the Cyclopædia various authors have erroneously spelled the title as 'Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography', placing the apostrophe in the wrong place.^[1]

Overview

The Cyclopædia included the names of over 20,000 native and adopted citizens of the United States, including living persons.

Also included were the names of several thousand citizens of all the other countries of North and South America. The aim was to embrace all notewo