Roswell Dwight Hitchcock was a Congregational minister, writer, professor of church history, and president of Union Theological Seminary from 1880 to 1887. He was born on August 15, 1817 in East Machias, Maine, and entered Andover Theological Seminary in 1838 following his undergraduate career at Amherst College (1836). Hitchcock tutored at Amherst from 1839 to 1842 before being ordained in the First Congregational Church in Exeter, New Hampshire. He served as a pastor and ongoing student in Germany, where he studied at the University of Halle and the University of Berlin. Hitchcock began his formal academic career at Bowdoin College, where he taught as the Collin Professor of Natural and Revealed Religion from 1852 to 1855. From there, he joined the faculty at Union Theological Seminary as a professor of church history. His academic tenure was marked by a number of publications, among them Life of Edward Robinson (1863), Complete Analysis of the Bible (1869), The New and Complete Analysis of the Holy Bible: or, the Whole of the Old and New Testaments Arranged According to Subjects in Twenty-Seven Books (1871); Hymns and Songs of Praise (1874), Hymns and Songs for Social and Sabbath Worship (1875). He also co-edited and translated the Carmina Sanctorum with Union colleague Dr. Francis Brown, and provided addenda and revisions to the Revised New Testament when it was published in 1881. In addition to his teaching, Hitchcock was an avid traveler with an interest in holy sites and religious geography, traveling through Italy, Greece, Egypt, Sinai and Palestine between 1866 and 1871. He was appointed president of the American Palestine Exploration Society in 1871, vice-president of the American Geographical Society in 1880, and served as editor of the American Theological Review. In addition to these roles beyond the pastorate, Reverend Hitchcock became the fourth president of Union Theological Seminary, serving in that role from 1880 until his death on June 16, 1887.