William Dwight Whitney was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer known for his work on Sanskrit grammar and Vedic philology as well as his influential view of language as a social institution. He was the first president of the American Philological Association and editor-in-chief of The Century Dictionary.
William Eugene Connolly is an American political theorist known for his work on democracy, pluralism, capitalism and climate change. He is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His 1974 work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award.
William Russell Easterly is an American economist, specializing in economic development. He is a professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is a Research Associate of NBER, senior fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) of Duke University, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Easterly is an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Growth.
William Eastlake was an American writer. His Checkerboard Trilogy, consisting of the works Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963) was included by literary critic Larry McCaffery in his list of the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction.
William Edmondstoune Aytoun FRSE was a Scottish poet, lawyer by training, and professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh. He published poetry, translation, prose fiction, criticism and satire and was a lifelong contributor to the Edinburgh literary periodical Blackwood's Magazine. He was also a collector of Scottish ballads.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky was an Irish historian, essayist, and political theorist with Whig proclivities. His major work was an eight-volume History of England during the Eighteenth Century.
William Edward Norris was a London-born English fiction and writer. His first story, Heap of Money, appeared in 1877, and was followed by a long series of novels and stories, many of which first appeared in the Temple Bar and Cornhill magazines.
William Edward Vickers (1889–1965) was an English mystery writer better known under his pen name Roy Vickers, but used also the pseudonyms Roy C. Vickers, David Durham, Sefton Kyle, and John Spencer. He is the author of over 60 crime novels and 80 short stories. Vickers is now remembered mostly for his attribution to Scotland Yard of a Department of Dead Ends, specialized in solving old, sometimes long-forgotten cases, mostly by chance encounters of odd bits of strange and apparently disconnected evidence.
William Eleroy Curtis was an American journalist, author, diplomat, political activist, and exhibitor. He was a prominent proponent of Pan-Americanism. Curtis' partisan reporting earned him patronage appointments and advanced his ideological goals. His career reflected the influence of bias, cronyism, and imperialism on journalism during the Gilded Age. Curtis held a series of leadership roles in the State Department, as well as the supranational organizations which anticipated the Organization of American States.
William Ellery Channing was the foremost Unitarian preacher in the United States in the early nineteenth century and, along with Andrews Norton (1786–1853), one of Unitarianism's leading theologians. Channing was known for his articulate and impassioned sermons and public speeches, and as a prominent thinker in the liberal theology of the day. His religion and thought were among the chief influences on the New England Transcendentalists although he never countenanced their views, which he saw as extreme. His espousal of the developing philosophy and theology of Unitarianism was displayed especially in his "Baltimore Sermon" of May 5, 1819, given at the ordination of the theologian and educator Jared Sparks (1789–1866) as the first minister of the newly organized First Independent Church of Baltimore.
