popular annual. In 1825 Sparks was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1827 as a member of the American Antiquarian Society. He later served two decades as the society's secretary for foreign correspondence, from 1846 to 1866. After extensive researches at home and in London and Paris in 1828–1829, he published The Writings of George Washington (12 volumes, 1834–1837; redated 1842), his most important work. In 1839 he published separately his Life of George Washington (abridged, 2 volumes, 1842). The work was for the most part favorably received, but Sparks was severely criticized by Lord Mahon (in the sixth volume of his History of England) and others for altering the text of some of Washington's writings. Sparks defended his methods in A Reply to the Strictures of Lord Mahon and Others (1852). The charges were not wholly justifiable, and later Lord Mahon (Stanhope) modified them. While continuing his studies abroad in 1840–1841, Sparks discovered in the French archives the red-line map that, in 1842 gained international prominence in connection with the dispute over the north-eastern U.S.-Canadian boundary. Conflict had resulted in the Aroostook War between the state of Maine in the United States and the Province of New Brunswick in Canada. Professorship Sparks was one of the American intellectuals who received French author and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville during his 1831–1832 visit to the United States. Their extensive conversations and subsequent correspondence informed de Tocqueville's best-known work, Democracy in America. In 1837, Sparks was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society. In 1842 Sparks delivered 12 lectures on American history before the Lowell Institute in Boston. In 1838–1849 he was the first McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard, endowed by the will of wealthy merchant John McLean (1761-1823). His appointment to this position, says his biographer, was the first academic encouragement of American history, and of original historical research in the American field. He was appointed in 1849 as president of Harvard College, and moved into a home on campus now called Treadwell-Sparks House. In 1853 Sparks retired on account of failing health, and devoted the rest of his life to his private studies. For several years he was a member of the Massachusetts Commonwealth Board of Education. Death Jared Sparks died on March 14, 1866, in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. His