History
The tournament was conceived in 1899 by four members of the Harvard University tennis team who came up with the idea of challenging the British to a tennis competition. Once the idea received the go-ahead from the United States Lawn Tennis Association and the British Lawn Tennis Association, Dwight F. Davis, one of the four Harvard players, designed a tournament format and spent money from his own pocket to purchase an appropriate sterling silver trophy from Shreve, Crump & Low. The first match between the United States and the British Isles was held at the Longwood Cricket Club in Boston, Massachusetts in 1900. The American team, of which Davis was a part, won the first three matches and the Challenge.
Read more about this topic: 1900 International Lawn Tennis Challenge
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“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)