A biography of diplomat William Smith Clark, an exponent of the modernization of Japan in the nineteenth century and founder of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

William Clark is famous as one of the leaders on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, but he was also a soldier, a politician, and Indian agent. When he was a young boy, America became an independent country and by the time he died, the young country had expanded beyond the Mississippi and more than doubled in size. William served in the Army, explored and mapped new territory, served as governor of the Missouri Territory, and worked to keep the peace between Native Americans and new American settlers moving west as the country expanded.

Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University uses the history of the university and reframes the "Protestant Ethic" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world. William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.

"There are letters concerning the establishing of the Corps of Discovery's first winter camp in December 1803, preparations for setting out into the country west of Fort Mandan in 1805, and Clark's fossil dig at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, in 1807. There are also letters about Lewis's disturbed final days that shed light on whether he committed suicide or was murdered.