James Garfield Randall

Randall, James Garfield, 1881–1953, American historian, b. Indianapolis, Ind. He taught history and political science at various colleges before joining (1920) the faculty of the Univ. of Illinois. A leading authority on Lincoln, Randall was a leader of the Civil War revisionists (who maintained that the war was not inevitable and came about as a result of the failures of American statesmanship). Randall wrote Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (1926), The Civil War and Reconstruction (1937; rev. by David Donald, 1961), Lincoln the President: Springfield to Gettysburg (4 vol., 1945–55; Vol. IV completed by R. N. Current), Lincoln and the South (1946), and Lincoln the Liberal Statesman (1947).

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