Herbert Baxter Adams (1850–1901) was an American educator and historian. A descendant of a Massachusetts Bay colonist, Adams was born in Shutesbury, Massachusetts. He studied at Amherst College, and received his doctorate at Heidelberg, Germany, in 1876. He was a fellow in history at Johns Hopkins University from 1876 to 1878, associate from 1878 to 1883, and was appointed associate professor in 1883. At Johns Hopkins, in 1880, he began his famous seminar, “Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science,” where many of the next generation of American historians trained. Adams helped found in 1884 the American Historical Association, for which he was secretary until 1900, when he resigned and was made first vice president.