Documentary architectural historian of the middle east. Butler was born to Edward Marchant Butler and Helen Belden Crosby (Butler). He was educated privately at the Lyons Collegiate Institute and the Berkeley School in New York, which allowed him to enter Princeton University as a sophomore, class of 1892.

Film and painting historian of German Expressionism. Eisner's father was Hugo Eisner (1856-1924), a textile exporter and magistrate, and her mother Margarethe Feodora Aron (1866-1942). She was raised in a prosperous middle-class Jewish family living in near the Zoo quarter of Berlin.