Winslow, Ola Elizabeth (1885?–1977) - Colonial Religious History

Ola Elizabeth Winslow was born around 1885 in Grant City, Missouri, to William and Hattie Elizabeth (Colby) Winslow. She received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1906 and an M.A. in 1914. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1922. From 1909 to 1914 she was an instructor at the College of the Pacific (now University of the Pacific), in San Jose, California. She then became professor of English and head of the department from 1914 to 1944 at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland; she was assistant dean from 1919 to 1921. She was professor at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, from 1944 to 1950 and professor emeritas from 1950 to 1977. She was also professor of English from 1950 to 1962 at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received a D.Litt. from Goucher College in 1951.

During her teaching years, Ola Winslow wrote a number of books, many of them historical. Her first historical biography, Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758 (1940), won a Pulitzer Prize in biography the next year. She then wrote Meetinghouse Hill, 1630–1783 (1952), Master Roger Williams (1957), John Bunyan (1961), Samuel Sewall of Boston (1964), and Portsmouth, the Life of a Town (1966), and was editor of Jonathan Edwards, Basic Writings (1966). She also wrote John Eliot: Apostle to the Indians (1968), “And Plead for the Rights of All”: Old South Church in Boston, 1669–1969 (1970), and A Destroying Angel: The Conquest of Smallpox in Colonial Boston (1974). Ola Winslow died in Damariscotta, Maine, on September 27, 1977.