James Burrill Angell (January 7, 1829 – April 1, 1916) was an American educator and diplomat. He is best known for being the longest-serving president of the University of Michigan, from 1871 to 1909. He represented the transition from small college life to nationally oriented universities. Under his energetic leadership, Michigan gained prominence as an elite public university. Angell is often cited by school administrators for providing the vision that the university should provide "an uncommon education for the common man." Angell was also president of the University of Vermont from 1866 to 1871 and helped that small school recover from its financial difficulties brought on by the Civil War. Throughout the war, he was the editor of The Providence Journal and was a consistent vocal supporter of Abraham Lincoln. Angell served in diplomatic posts as America's minister to China from 1880 to 1881 and then to the Ottoman Empire from 1897 to 1898. On his mission to China, he was the primary American negotiator of the Angell Treaty of 1880 that curtailed the emigration of laborers to the United States, as well as a second treaty restricting the trade in opium. In the Ottoman Empire, he was responsible for the protection of American missionaries during the unrest following the massacre of Armenians. Angell was a member of a prominent Yankee family in Rhode Island, and many of his descendants became senior academics. Early life James Burrill Angell was born January 7, 1829, in Scituate, Rhode Island, the eldest of eight children of Andrew Aldrich Angell and Amy Aldrich, who themselves were distantly related; he was named after a former senator, James Burrill. The Angells had been a prominent family in and around Providence, Rhode Island, since its founding in 1636 by Roger Williams and his companion Thomas Angell. Though scant, there is evidence suggesting Thomas Angell's ancestors were relations of Henry I of England. Thomas Angell's grandson had settled the farm where James was born in 1710, the same year he founded the Angell Tavern, where Scituate's leaders held town meetings after its incorporation in 1730, and where men such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the Marquis de Lafayette stayed during the Revolutionary War. Angell's grandfather built an inn on the site in 1810, and Angell credited his boyhood interaction with the travelers who passed through for some of his later success, saying, "... the knowledge of men