Hello, I'm David Canardine. Welcome to Princeton University in New Jersey here in the United States,

which may seem a strange place to be making a program about the

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

We'll get to that in a minute.

But first let me remind you that in the last program,

we heard about the early days of the Dictionary of National Biography

set up by a London publisher George Murray Smith.

It was a national project for a country with a great empire, and many of those whose lives were

recorded had made their name far from Britain's shores, as Viceroys, as

Governors General, as Soldiers, as Missionaries, as Traders, and even as Revolutionaries.

As well as being editor of what is now the Oxford Dictionary of National

biography, I'm also a professor of history here at Princeton University, and I'm

constantly reminded of the injunction of the original editor Leslie Stephen that from the outset he wanted the dictionary to include Americans who were also British subjects in his dictionary.

Smith, Robert, 1722 to 1777, Carpenter and Architect, was born at Lugton, a hamlet,

8 miles southwest of Edinburgh on the 14th of January, 1722.

He first comes to light in Philadelphia in 1749,

working for the governor of Pennsylvania, James Hamilton, at his showy new suburban establishment, Bush Hill, 1749 to 51.

Robert Smith was the quintessential immigrant achiever. By the 1760s he was involved in all

Philadelphia's major church building projects and by that stage he'd already designed

and built this huge structure at the center of Princeton University campus, Nassau Hall.

It's covered in Ivy, appropriate for the headquarters of an Ivy League University.

I'm now walking up the steps. It's a grand entrance and

...