At times, he seemed more like a Hoosier schoolmaster than an eminent historian. He was long and lean, baggily dressed, and always in need of a haircut—"a poor professor," he liked to say, "on his way from obscurity to oblivion." But when Charles Austin Beard threw back his head, squinted down his long nose, and began to lecture at Columbia University, students jammed in to hear him. And when he perched on the edge of a desk to speak of his own research ("Now I'll tell you what I found out last night"), historians from all over the U.S. came...
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