James Baldwin (1841–1925) was an American educator and editor whose books of stories for children had a great influence on the education of young people in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. Born in Indiana, Baldwin was largely self-educated and became a teacher at the age of twenty-four. He served as the superintendent of Indiana’s school system for eighteen years before becoming a publisher of educational textbooks as well as other children’s stories. He wrote more than fifty books including Fifty Famous Stories Retold (1896) and Abraham Lincoln, a True Life (1904).