David Macpherson (historian)

David Macpherson (26 October 1746–1 August 1816) was a Scottish historian.

Life

The son of a tailor and clothier, Macpherson was born in Edinburgh, 26 October 1746. He was probably educated at Edinburgh High School and the University of Edinburgh and then trained as a land surveyor. Working in the UK and America, he was able to earn some money before 1790, about which time he settled with his wife and family in London making his living as a man of letters.[1]

Losing money through bad loans, Macpherson was occasionally in straitened circumstance from then on, but continued to write, encouraged by antiquarians such as Joseph Ritson and George Chalmers. He died in London, 1 August 1816.[1]

Works

For some time Macpherson was a deputy-keeper of the public records, and assisted in preparing for publication the first and part of the second volume of the Rotuli Scotiæ. He edited Andrew Wyntoun's Orygynal Cronykil of Scotland, 2 vols., 1795; it was re-edited, in an enlarged form, by David Laing, for the Historians of Scotland series, 1879. Macpherson's other works were:[1]

  • Geographical Illustrations of Scottish History, 1796.
  • Annals of Commerce, Fisheries, and Navigation ... from the earliest Accounts to the Meeting of the Union Parliament in 1801 (with the essentials of Adam Anderson's History of Commerce), 4 vols. 1805.
  • The History of European Commerce with India, 1812.

Notes

  1. Bayne, Thomas Wilson (1893). "Macpherson, David" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. 35. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Bayne, Thomas Wilson (1893). "Macpherson, David". In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. 35. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

gollark: Hmm, yes, apparently Linux has a monotonic clock thing available.
gollark: Possibly an OS thing.
gollark: Go has its own *assembly language* because of course.
gollark: When someone asked for monotonic time to be exposed properly, GUESS WHAT, they decided to "fix" the whole thing in the most Go way possible by "transparently" adding monotonic time to the existing time handling, in some bizarre convoluted way which was a breaking change for lots of code and which limited the range time structs could represent rather a lot.
gollark: Rust, which is COOL™, has monotonic time and system time and such as separate types. Go did *not* have monotonic time for ages, but *did* have an internal function for it which wasn't exposed because of course.
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