ABSTRACT
Contemporary scholars typically judge each other’s success by the length of their curriculum vitae and, particularly, by the length of their publication list. By this standard, Charles A. Beard (1874-1948) was a prodigious scholar whose publications in history and political science consist of forty-two books, thirty-five co-authored books, thirty chap ters in edited collections, twenty-five prefaces or introductions to books, 330 articles, 150 book reviews, and numerous letters to major newspa pers and magazines.1 By the end of his life, Beard’s history books alone (i.e., not including political science) had sold more than 11.3 million volumes in the United States due primarily to his authorship of basic textbooks and to his large popular audience.2 Following his death in 1948, scholars were virtually unanimous in their evaluation of Beard’s intellectual impact on the historical disciplines.
