William Borah state of Idaho in 1947, stands in the National Statuary Hall Collection. William Edgar Borah was born in Jasper Township, Illinois, near Fairfield in Wayne County. His parents were farmers Elizabeth (West) and William Nathan Borah. Borah was distantly related to Katharina von Bora, the Catholic nun who left her convent in the 16th century and married reformer Martin Luther. His Borah ancestors came to America in about 1760, fought in the Revolutionary War, and moved west with the frontier. The young William E. Borah was the seventh of ten children, and the third son. Although Borah was not a
Catharine McClellan doing so, she helped standardize the rules for transcribing oral history. Catharine’s attitude towards her Northern research was inherently feminist. At the age of 25 she married cultural ecologist John Hitchcock. Their scholarly partnership began when they worked at the University of Wisconsin, Madison together, though they were not romantically involved until years later. Catharine graduated from her undergraduate degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 1942. From there she moved to California to study at the University of California, Berkeley beginning in 1946 where she was supervised by Robert Lowie. In 1950 Catharine received her PhD from American