Craven, Avery Odelle, 1886–1980, American historian, b. Randolph co., N.C.; Ph.D., Univ. of Chicago, 1923. He taught at several colleges in the Midwest before returning (1928) to Chicago and becoming (1929) professor of American history. Craven led the revisionist school of American historians that believes in the avoidability of the Civil War. His chief works are Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860 (1926); Edmund Ruffin, Southerner: a Study in Secession (1932); The Repressible Conflict, 1830–1861 (1939); The Coming of the Civil War (1942, 2d ed. 1957); The Rise of Southern Nationalism (1953); The Civil War in the Making 1815–1860 (1959); and An Historian and the Civil War (1964).
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