Researching William Shepherd

Shepherd was educated at Crewe and worked as a manufacturing chemist and company director and director of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. He served with the army in France, Belgium and the Netherlands during World War II, reaching the rank of Lieutenant.

Shepherd was elected Member of Parliament for Bucklow at the 1945 general election and for Cheadle from 1950 until 1966, when he was defeated by the Liberal Dr. Michael Winstanley.

In Parliament, Shepherd served as a senior member of the Conservative Parliamentary Committee on Trade and Industry and wrote extensively on industrial and social matters.

He also spoke out against reform of anti-homosexual laws, once stating "The proper way to look at homosexuality is to regard it not as something separate but as something to which any of us can succumb if the circumstances of our lives or the weakness of our outlook make us susceptible."

In the 1980s, he joined the Social Democratic Party.

In 1896, Shepherd completed his PhD at Columbia University. He then studied in Berlin and finally became professor of history at Columbia University. He is best known for his Historical Atlas, published in several editions during the early twentieth century. He is considered a pioneer in the field of Latin American history. Shepherd's address to the 1909 meeting of the American Historical Association was "probably the first time that a part of the program of the annual meeting was devoted to the history of other peoples in the Americas." In his remarks, he decried that in the United States the history of the western hemisphere focuses on the English colonies and ignores or disparages the history of Spanish, Portuguese, and French America. He called for a more balanced history of the Americas, stressing "That the history of the Spanish, Portuguese, and the French in America possesses an interest and a significance of its own, entirely apart from its relation to the "Anglo-American" element."