Thomas Henry Kearney (27 June 1874 – 19 October 1956) was an American botanist and agronomist known for his work on cotton and date palm breeding, plant taxonomy, and the flora of Arizona. Kearney was born on 27 June 1874 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He enrolled in the University of Tennessee in 1889, and began working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1894, where he would work for the next 50 years. Kearney published a revision of North American Calamagrostis in 1898, describing 23 new species or varieties. From 1898 to 1900 Kearney participated in the Harriman Alaska Expedition. In the early 1900s Kearney traveled throughout North Africa to study crops such as dates and cotton in arid and alkali soils, and began a decades-long period of cotton-breeding research in Arizona. Kearney served