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John Addison Porter (March 15, 1822 - August 25, 1866) was an American Professor of Chemistry. He was born in Catskill, New York and died in New Haven, Connecticut. He, along with William Kingsley, publisher of The New Englander, and eleven others, founded the senior or secret society Scroll and Key and incorporated the Kingsley Trust Association (K.T.A.) at Yale University in 1841.

Contents 1 Academic life 2 Personal life 3 Works and Achievements 3.1 Literary works 4 John Addison Porter Prize 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Academic life

Porter graduated from Yale College in 1842 and moved to Philadelphia for further study. In 1844 he became a professor at Delaware College and remained there until 1847 when he moved to Germany to study at the University of Giessen under Justus von Liebig.

In 1850 he returned to the United states and became a professor at Brown University. He left in 1852 to take the place of the retiring Professor John Pitkin Norton at Sheffield Scientific School (then Yale Scientific School). He remained at Yale until he had to resign for health reasons in 1864, two years before his death. In 1872 the Kingsley Trust endowed at Yale a prize in his honor to be given annually.

[edit] Personal life

In 1855 he married Josephine Earl Sheffield, daughter of Joseph E. Sheffield, whose name adorns the school where he was professor for 12 years.

One of their sons was another John Addison Porter (1856-1900), born in New Haven, Connecticut on April 17, 1856, who also graduated from Yale (in 1878) and published many articles and pieces of his own work.^[1] He was a politician and the first official "Secretary to the President" ^[2]. when he served under that capacity to William McKinley. It is in his honor that his wife established in 1901 a prize for undergraduates for the best work of history.

[edit] Works and Achievements

[edit] Literary works

• First book of chemistry and allied sciences. 1857
• Principles of chemistry. 1857, 1860, 1864, 1868
• First book of science. 1858
• Outlines of the first course of Yale agricultural lectures. 1860
• Selections from the Kalevala, the Great Finnish Epic. 1868

Porter was the first person to translate any part of the Finnish national epic Kalevala into English using the German translation by Franz Anton Schiefner (the same version used by John Martin Crawford for his complete 1888 translation).

[edit] John Addison Porter Prize

The John Addison Porter Prize is a prize at Yale University awarded annually to the best work of scholarship in any field "where it is possible, through original effort, to gather and relate facts or principles, or both, and to present the results in such a literary form as to make the product of general human interest."^[3] It is among the highest awards the university confers.

The prize was established in 1872 in honor of Professor John Addison Porter, B.A. 1842. A separate prize for undergraduate junior and senior history majors was established in 1901. Winners of the John Addison Porter Prize over the years have included:

• 1873:
• 1874:
• 1875: Henry Martin Ladd ^[4]
• 1876:
• 1877:
• 1878: Henry Ammon James ^[5]
• 1879:
• 1880:
• 1881: no prize given ^[6]
• 1882:
• 1883:
• 1884: Thorstein B. Veblen ^[7]
• 1885:
• 1886:
• 1887:
• 1888:
• 1889:
• 1890: Gerald H. Beard ^[8]
• 1910: William Smith Culbertson ^[9]
• 1911: Jack Randall Crawford ^[10]
• 1923: Dumas Malone
• 1933: George W. Pierson
• 1940: Liston Pope
• 1941: Eric R. Bentley
• 1947: Richard D. Ellmann
• 1950: Hugh Kenner
• 1955: Harold Bloom^[11]
• 1957: William H. Goetzmann
• 1965: Jonathan D. Spence
• 1972: Frank M. Turner
• 1974: Joan Shelley Rubin
• 1976: Stephen Holmes
• 1981: Florencia Elizabeth Mallon
• 1982:
• 1983:
• 1984:
• 1985:
• 1986:
• 1987: Candace Waid
• 1988:
• 1989:
• 1990:
• 1991: Jon E. Lendon
• 1992: Craig Williams
• 1993:
• 1994:
• 1995:
• 1996:
• 1997:
• 1998: Karl H. Jacoby & Jennifer Price ^[12]
• 1999: Blair Gerald Hoxby ^[13]
• 2000: Michael Rubin & Salim Yaqub ^[14]
• 2001: Peter Silver & Jeremi Suri
• 2002: Josiah Osgood
• 2003: Mark Oppenheimer & Lucy Chester
• 2004: Jonathan Reed Winkler & Erez Manela
• 2005: Aaron Sachs
• 2006:
• 2007: Elizabeth Levy Paluck & Stephen Vella ^[15]
• 2008: Elizabeth N. Saunders & Siddhartha Das
• 2009: Hal Brands & Wendy Warren

[edit] References

[edit] External links

This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (March 2009)

• Yale university prizes. History
• Article from New Englander and Yale review. (Volume 27, Issue 103) On Porters early translation of parts of the Finnish epic, Kalevala