De Alva Stanwood Alexander (1845-1925) was an American journalist, lawyer, historian, and member of the United States House of Representatives. At 16 he enlisted in the Ohio Volunteer Infantry and fought in the Civil War. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1870, worked briefly as a teacher and newspaper editor in Fort Wayne, Indiana and then moved to Indianapolis, where he was a correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette. He studied law, was admitted to the Indiana Bar in 1877, and went into private practice, moving to Buffalo, New York in 1885. In Indianapolis, he met and formed a friendship with U. S. Senator Benjamin Harrison. After Harrison was elected President of the United States in 1888, he appointed Alexander as United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York. In 1896, Alexander was elected as a Republican to the United States Congress, where he served seven terms until he was defeated for reelection in 1910. While still serving in Congress, Alexander began work on A Political History of the State of New York, a four-volume work finally completed in 1923, and also wrote History and Procedure of the House of Representatives (1916).