William Ralston Balch
William Ralston Balch | |
|---|---|
Portrait in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1879 | |
| Born | December 9, 1852 Leetown, Virginia, United States |
| Died | March 7, 1923 (aged 70) Somerville, Massachusetts, United States |
| Notable work | The Complete Compendium of Universal Knowledge |
| Signature | |
William Ralston Balch (pseudonym C. C. C.;[1] December 9, 1852 – March 7, 1923) was an American journalist and author who wrote The Complete Compendium of Universal Knowledge, among other reference works. A supplemented edition of James Sanks Brisbin's biography of James A. Garfield, published in 1881, was credited wholly to him.
Biography
Born on December 9, 1852[2] in Leetown, Virginia,[3] he began his newspaper work in the composing room of the Concord Monitor as a boy in 1871. He was connected with the London Bureau of the Associated Press for several years. Balch was responsible for the raising of the $500,000 fund of the London Daily Mail during the Boer War. In this work he secured the co-operation of Rudyard Kipling, whose poem, "The Absent-minded Beggar," which he wrote especially for this cause, brought so much money into the office of the Mail that it was decided to found a veterans' hospital at Portsmouth, England.[4]
Balch contributed to the London Daily Mail an exclusive account of the impending death of Queen Victoria, developed out of a noblewoman's remark to her dressmaker that black would be the fashion that winter.[4] In Boston he tracked down the suspected murderer Chastine Cox, who had long baffled the New York police.[5] In 1879, he was managing editor of The Philadelphia Press, and later was connected with the Boston Daily Advertiser and Boston Herald.[4]
When Balch served as a founding editor of The American in 1880, the magazine featured notable contributors like Henry Cuyler Bunner, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and Walt Whitman.[6][7] In 1884, he wrote a biography of Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine.[8] Balch was the author of the War Chronicle in the columns of the Boston Evening Transcript during World War I. He died on March 7, 1923[4][9] in Somerville Massachusetts.[3]
Personal
Balch was the son of Rev. Dr. Lewis Penn Witherspoon Balch Jr. (1814–1875) and his second wife Emily Wiggin Balch (1826–1891). Thomas Balch was one of his uncles.[9][10]
On June 21, 1881, Balch married Elizabeth Singerly. They had one daughter.[10]
Bibliography
Balch's encyclopedia titled "The Complete Compendium of Universal Knowledge" was published in 1891. His biography of American president James A. Garfield was published in 1881,[11] although it was only a republished edition of James Sanks Brisbin's biography of Garfield, to which Balch had presumably added chapters.[12] Balch wrote other encyclopedias around the same time, including The People's Dictionary and Every-day Encyclopedia in 1883 and Ready Reference: The Universal Cyclopaedia Containing Everything that Everybody Wants to Know in 1901.[13][14][15]
- Garfield, James Abram (1881). Balch, William Ralston (ed.). Garfield's Words: Suggestive Passages from the Public and Private Writings of James Abram Garfield. Houghton, Mifflin.
- Balch, William Ralston (1881). Life of James Abram Garfield: Late President of the United States. J.C. McCurdy & Company.
- Balch, William Ralston, ed. (1882). Mines, Miners and Mining Interests of the United States in 1882. Mining industrial publishing house.
- Balch, William Ralston (1883). A Message from the Sea: Cape May to Atlantic City: A Summer Note Book. Philadelphia: Press of Allen, Lane & Scott.
- Balch, William Ralston, ed. (1883). The People's Dictionary and Every-day Encyclopedia: Comprising All the Information Needed Upon Any Subject in Daily Use : a Hand-book for Everybody for Each Day in the Year. Thayer, Merriam.
- Balch, William Ralston (1884). An American Career and Its Triumph: The Life and Public Services of James G. Blaine, with the Facts in the Career of John A. Logan. Philadelphia: Thayer, Merriam & Company, Limited.
- Balch, William Ralston (1885). The Battle of Gettysburg: An Historical Account. Philadelphia: Press of McLaughlin Bros. Co.
- Balch, William Ralston (1891). The Complete Compendium of Universal Knowledge: Containing All You Want to Know of Language, History, Government, Business and Social Forms, and a Thousand and One Other Useful Subjects. Franklin Square Bible House.
- Balch, William Ralston, ed. (1902). Ready Reference: The Universal Cyclopaedia Containing Everything that Everybody Wants to Know. Griffith Farran Browne & Company.
References
- ^ Cushing, William (1885). Initials and Pseudonyms: A Dictionary of Literary Disguises. Vol. 1. Thomas Y. Crowell. p. 45.
- ^ Balch, Thomas Willing (1907). Balch Genealogica. Allen, Lane and Scott. p. 233. ISBN 978-0-598-99692-3. OL 23279991M.
{{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help) - ^ a b Balch, William Ralston (1973). "Foreword". The Complete Compendium of Universal Knowledge: Containing All You Want to Know of Language, History, Government, Business and Social Forms, and a Thousand and One Other Useful Subjects. Foreword by the publishers. Simulacrum Press, a division of Syntonic Research. Retrieved 2025-02-23.
- ^ a b c d This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: "WILLIAM RALSTON BALCH DEAD". Editor & Publisher. Vol. 55, no. 42. 1923-03-17. p. 25. Retrieved 2025-02-23 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Thompson 2019, p. 4.
- ^ Oliver, Charles M. (2005). "American, The". Critical Companion to Walt Whitman: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4381-0858-2.
- ^ Mott, Frank Luther (1938). A History of American Magazines, Volume III: 1865-1885. Harvard University Press. p. 41. ISBN 978-0-674-39552-7.
{{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help) - ^ Miles, William (1979). The Image Makers: A bibliography of American presidential campaign biographies. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. p. 116. ISBN 978-0-8108-1252-9. Retrieved 2025-07-08 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ a b "William Ralston Batch". The New York Times. March 9, 1923. p. 15. Retrieved 2025-07-07.
- ^ a b Balch, Galusha Burchard (1897). Genealogy of the Balch Families in America. Salem, Massachusetts: E. Putnam. pp. 470–472, 492. Retrieved 2025-07-06 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Cooper, Trevor (2018). Middle-class millions: The creation of Atlantic City's "modern" image, 1890–1910 (MA thesis). James Madison University. p. 28. Retrieved 2025-02-23.
- ^ Casper, Scott E. (2018-07-25). Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. UNC Press Books. p. 389. ISBN 978-1-4696-4904-7.
- ^ Allibone 1896, p. 79.
- ^ Heinrich 1997, p. 248.
- ^ Doleželová-Velingerová & Wagner 2013, p. 366.
Sources
- Heinrich, A.V. (1997). Currents in Japanese Culture: Translations and Transformations. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-09696-6. Retrieved 2020-05-28.
- Doleželová-Velingerová, M.; Wagner, R.G. (2013). Chinese Encyclopaedias of New Global Knowledge (1870-1930): Changing Ways of Thought. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. ISBN 978-3-642-35916-3. Retrieved 2020-05-28.
- Allibone, Samuel Austin (1896). A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, Living and Deceased: From the Earliest Accounts to the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1. Lippincott.
- Thompson, Courtney E (2019-08-01). "The Curious Case of Chastine Cox: Murder, Race, Medicine and the Media in the Gilded Age". Social History of Medicine. 32 (3): 481–501. doi:10.1093/shm/hkx112. ISSN 0951-631X.