Hiram Bingham III

Hiram Bingham III (November 19, 1875 – June 6, 1956) was an American academic, explorer and politician. In 1911, he publicized the existence of the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu which he rediscovered with the guidance of local indigenous farmers. Later, Bingham served as the 69th governor of Connecticut for a single day in 1925—the shortest term in history. He had been elected in 1924 as governor, but was also elected to the Senate and chose that position. He served as a member of the United States Senate until 1933.

Early life and early academic career Bingham was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, the son of Clara Brewster and Hiram Bingham II (1831–1908), an early Protestant missionary to the Kingdom of Hawai'i. He was also the grandson of Hiram Bingham I (1789–1869) and Sybil Moseley Bingham (1792–1848), earlier missionaries. Through his mother's side he was a descendant of William Brewster, a Mayflower passenger. He attended O'ahu College, now known as Punahou School, from 1882 to 1892. Bingham went to the United States in his teens in order to undertake higher education, entering Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from which he graduated in 1894. He earned a B.A. degree from Yale College in 1898, a degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1900, where he took one of the first courses in Latin American history offered in the United States, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1905. Since Harvard at the time did not have a specialist in Latin American history, Edward Gaylord Bourne of Yale served as the examiner for Bingham's qualifying exams. While at Yale, Bingham was a member of Acacia fraternity. In his first academic position, he taught history and politics at Harvard. He next served as preceptor (teacher) under Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University. Princeton "did not much favor Latin American history." But in 1907, when Yale sought a replacement for Bourne, who had died an early death, it appointed Bingham as a lecturer in South American history. He became one of the pioneers in the U.S. of teaching and research on Latin American history. In 1908, he published an assessment of the field's prospects, "The Possibilities of South American History and Politics as a Field for Research," in which he surveyed library and archival resources in the U.S. as well as in South America. From 1924, he was a member of the Acorn Club.

Explorer

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