James Zachariah George

James Zachariah George 1826-97, American jurist and legislator, b. Monroe co., Ga. He moved to Mississippi in 1834 and, after serving in the Mexican War, became a prominent lawyer. He was long a reporter and later (1879-81) chief justice of the state supreme court. A signer of Mississippi's secession ordinance and a Confederate brigadier general in the Civil War, he was a leader in the struggle for white supremacy in Mississippi during the Reconstruction period. George wrote the "grandfather clause," which effectively ended black suffrage, in the Mississippi constitution of 1890. He later defended his views on the floor of the U.S. Senate, where he served from 1881 until his death. Known in Mississippi as the Great Commoner, he played an important role in drafting the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890). His unfinished Political History of Slavery in the United States (1915) contains a biographical sketch by W. H. Leavell.

James, George Payne Rainsford (1799–1860), was appointed historiographer royal by William IV. Influenced by Sir W. Scott he wrote numerous romantic novels, biographies, and popular historical works, including Richelieu (1829), Darnley (1830), Life of Edward the Black Prince (1836). Thackeray parodied him as ‘the solitary horseman’ in his burlesque Barbazure, by G. P. R. Jeames, esq. for the two horsemen who were a frequent beginning to his romances.

Frazer, Sir James George (1854–1941), fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1879. He held the chair of anthropology in Liverpool from 1907. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern anthropology. The Golden Bough (12 vols, 1890–1915; followed by Aftermath, a Supplement in 1936) is a vast and enterprising comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, offering the thesis that man progresses from magical through religious to scientific thought. Its discussion of fertility rites, the sacrificial killing of kings, the dying god, the scapegoat, etc., and its analysis of the primitive mind, caught the literary imagination, and its influence may perhaps be seen most lastingly in the works of D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, and Pound. Frazer's many other works include Totemism and Exogamy (1910) and Folklore in the Old Testament (1918).