Early Life and Education
The grandson and namesake of Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (1841-1924), physicist and meteorologist, his father was a Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Charles Elwood Mendenhall (1872-1935), and his mother, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall (1874-1964), a well-known pediatrician. The young Thomas Mendenhall grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and went to Andover before attending Yale University, where he graduated in 1932. Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he attended Balliol College, Oxford in 1935-36, earning a B.Litt. degree. While at Oxford, he was captain of the Balliol Boats. Mendenhall returned to Yale, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Welsh wool trade in the 16th and 17th centuries, receiving his Ph.D. in history in 1938. As a graduate student, he rowed on the Berkeley College (Yale) intramural crew.
He married Cornelia Isabel Baker on June 4, 1938. Together, they eventually had three daughters.
Read more about this topic: Thomas C. Mendenhall (historian)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
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“Toward education marriage nervous breakdown, operation, teaching
school, and learning to be mad, in a dream—what is this
life?”
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