James L. Axtell (December 20, 1941 - August 29, 2023) was an American historian. He was a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Axtell, whose interests lie in American Indian history and the history of higher education, was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.^[1] Axtell retired at the end of the spring 2008 semester, although he taught a class at Princeton University in the fall of 2009.^[2][3]

Axtell was born in Endicott, New York on December 20, 1941 to Laura England and Arthur James Axtell, partners in a small accounting firm. In 1946, Axtell's parents divorced, and he moved with his father to his grandparents' small farm in Sidney, New York, where his father remarried in 1948.

Axtell attended Sidney Central High School, graduating in 1959, and was recruited to Yale University to play basketball. He switched to track and field as a freshman and set school records in the indoor long-jump and outdoor triple-jump. Axtell graduated from Yale in 1963, having also attended the Oxford International Summer School the previous year. He then began pursuing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he once again participated in athletics, breaking Cambridge's long-jump record and being chosen for the All-England university basketball team due to his high scoring on the Cambridge team. Axtell later claimed he had finished his dissertation in only two years to avoid having to guard Bill Bradley on the Oxford team the following year. He earned his PhD in 1967, and his dissertation on “The Educational Writings of John Locke” was published the following year by Cambridge University Press.^[4]

• Wisdom′s Workshop. The Rise of the Modern University. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 2016, ISBN 978-1-4008-8042-3.