Vera Lee Brown

Vera Lee Brown Holmes (September 21, 1890 – November 19, 1980) was a Canadian-American historian. Born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, she got her PhD at Bryn Mawr College after a delay caused by World War I and worked as a professor at Smith College from 1924 until her retirement in 1958. A 1931 Guggenheim Fellow, she also wrote A History of the Americas, with its two volumes released in 1950 and 1965.

Biography Vera Lee Brown, the daughter of Anna Dorothea ( Scovil) and Frank Manson Brown, was born on September 21, 1890, in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She was educated at Netherwood School for Girls and McGill University, the latter of where she got her AB in 1912 and AM in 1913. In 1922, the dissertation granted her a PhD at Bryn Mawr and was published as a book, Anglo-Spanish Relations in America in the Closing Years of the Colonial Era (1763–1774).

In 1931, she was elected a Guggenheim Fellow for research on Spain–United Kingdom relations in the context of 18th-century colonialism. During her career in Smith, she started directing a history of the Americas course there in 1935.

In 1936, she married John Herbert Arkwright Holmes, an English-born Anglican priest who served as dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Fredericton from 1932 until 1936 and as dean of divinity at University of King's College from 1936 until 1955. They were married until his death in 1963, She is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery in Fredericton, New Brunswick. A History of the Americas: From Nationhood to World Status (1965)