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Concept
George and Elizabeth Peckham
Summary
George Williams Peckham (March 23, 1845 – January 10, 1914) and Elizabeth Maria Gifford Peckham (December 19, 1854 – February 11, 1940) were a married couple who were early American teachers, taxonomists, ethologists, arachnologists, and entomologists, specializing in animal behavior and in the study of jumping spiders (family Salticidae) and wasps.
George Peckham was born in Albany, New York in 1845. At age 18, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in the American Civil War, reaching the rank of first lieutenant. After the war, he resumed his studies, obtaining a law degree from Albany Law School in 1867. After graduation, George worked at the law office of James T. Brown of Milwaukee. Not caring for the law, however, he became a student in the medical college of the University of Michigan, earning his M.D. in 1872. Rather than practice medicine, however, he chose to teach biology at East Division High School of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1880, he organized the first American biological laboratory program in any high school, and in same year he married his colleague, Elizabeth Maria Gifford, one of the first science graduates from Vassar. In 1888, Peckham became principal of East Division, and in 1891, an inspector for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. He also served during this period as president of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. In 1897, he became the director of the Milwaukee Public Library, in which position he served until retirement in 1910. He died on January 10, 1914, at the age of 68.
Elizabeth Maria Gifford (later Peckham) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1854, later using the abbreviated forename 'Bessie' amongst friends as attested to by her classmate Sara Fleming Sharpe. She graduated from Vassar College in 1876 and earned her master's degree in Biology from Vassar in 1888 or 1889. Although her obituary records that her later interests took her elsewhere, she retained making notifications to Vassar alumnae.
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