Joel Dorman Steele

Joel Dorman Steele (May 14, 1836 – May 25, 1886) was an American educator. He and his wife Esther Baker Steele were important textbook writers of their period, on subjects including American history, chemistry, human physiology, physics, astronomy, and zoology. He was an influential figure in the movement to standardize science education in the mid-late 19th century. In the preface to his posthumous Popular Physics, the publisher writes that his books "attained an extraordinary degree of popularity, due to the author's attractive style, his great skill in the selection of material suited to the demands of the schools for which the books were intended, his sympathetic spirit toward both teachers and pupils, and his earnest Christian character, which was exhibited in all his writing." Born May 14, 1836, in Lima, New York, he became a country schoolteacher at the age of 17, leaving that position after an outbreak of typhoid fever killed his mother in 1851. He graduated from Genesee College (which later became Syracuse University) in 1858, and became a school principal in Oswego County in 1859. After being seriously injured in the American Civil War, he returned to a school principalship in 1862, in Newark, New York, and in 1866 moved to another school in Elmira, New York. In 1872 he gave up teaching and devoted himself to full-time writing. He died in Elmira, on May 25, 1886. Steele is the namesake of the Joel Dorman Steele professorship at Syracuse University, currently held by A. P. Balachandran. It was announced on October 18, 2012 that Prof Mark Bowick would take over the position. The Steele Memorial Library in Elmira is also named after him; Esther Baker Steele Hall at Syracuse University is named after his wife.