Gould, Alice Bache, 1868-1953

Alice Bache Gould, scion of a distinguished New England family, Bryn Mawr graduate, and university teacher in the field of mathematics, became a pioneer scholar of the history of early exploration in the Caribbean, and particularly of Chistopher Columbuss voyages. She pursued this work in many libraries and archives, and spent much of the last forty years of her life in Spain. The collection consists of correspondence between Alice Bache Gould and Samuel Vaughn, her trustee in Boston. The letters, mostly written from Spain during the late 1930s and early 1940s, allude to Goulds financial circumstances, her travels and her social and scholarly pursuits.

From the description of Alice Bache Gould papers, 1937-1946. (New York University). WorldCat record id: 473387053

Mathematician.

From the description of Papers, 1778-1939. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 154302997

From the description of Papers, 1778-1939. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 154302279

Alice Bache Gould was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1868, and was descended from several highly distinguished New England families. Her mother's family, the Quincy's had been prominent in Massachusetts affairs since before the Revolution, and her father, Benjamin Apthorp Gould, was a Harvard graduate and a well-known astronomer. Her independent means enabled her to travel widely in pursuit of her pioneering scholarly work, and also to pursue a number of philanthropic projects. She was raised in Quincy and was educated at the newly formed Bryn Mawr College, graduating in the class of 1889. She continued her education in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, and was hired as a faculty member in that field at Bryn Mawr. In 1903, after she discovered an important document about Barbados while in Puerto Rico, her scholarly interest changed from mathematics to the study of the earliest voyages of discovery across the Atlantic. In 1911, at age forty-three, she first traveled to Spain, where she visited the Archive of the Indies to investigate Christopher Columbus's route to Barbados. Fluent in Spanish, she was to spend seven years in Puerto Rico and most of four decades in Spain pursuing her interest in early exploration. She taught at a number of universities in the United States, endowed scholarship funds and left rich collections of research material to institutions in Spain and the U.S. Her work won high praise from Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, and the Spanish government awarded her several prestigious honors. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment as a scholar was the compilation of the names and biographies of all the members of the crew of Columbus's first voyage.

After many visits to Spain in earlier years, Miss Gould traveled there in July 1939, apparently with the intention of settling permanently. Her letters, written from hotels in Seville, Valladolid and other Spanish locales, convey a vivid sense of the life of a relatively well-off American in pre-war and World War II-era Spain. The correspondence also records her contacts with Spanish government officials in the United States before 1939, and her views of Spanish life and affairs. A notable passage in a letter of May 1, 1939, recalls May Day demonstrations in Seville in May 1936 [mistakenly dated 1937 in the letter] in which the socialist and anarchist masses seemed to her "like wild beasts." Alice Bache Gould died on July 25, 1953 at her home in Simancas, Spain.

From the guide to the Alice Bache Gould Papers, 1937-1946, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)