Henry Cabot Lodge was born in Boston on May 12, 1850, the son of a wealthy Brahman merchant and shipowner. After receiving his BA from Harvard in 1871, he enrolled at Harvard Law School, earning an LLB degree in 1874. At the same time, he took up graduate work in medieval history at Harvard under the direction of the historian and writer Henry Adams. In 1876 he received one of the first history PhDs in the United States and published his dissertation under the title Anglo-Saxon Law. From 1873 to 1876 he served as assistant editor of the North American Review, the foremost intellectual monthly in the United States, after which he became coeditor of the International Review. During the academic year 1878–1879 he taught American history at Harvard.