Charles C. Tansill

Charles Callan Tansill (December 9, 1890 – November 12, 1964) was an American historian and the author of fourteen history books. He was a professor of history at American University, Fordham University, and Georgetown University. An isolationist before World War II, he was accused of revisionism after the war.

Early life Tansill was born in 1890 in Fredericksburg, Texas. He received a bachelor's degree, followed by a master's degree and a PhD in history from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He received another PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1918.

Career Tansill was assistant professor of history at the Catholic University of America and American University. He was full professor of American history at American University from 1921 to 1937. He became professor of history at Fordham University in 1939, up until 1944. He was Professor of History at Georgetown University from 1944 to 1957. Over the course of his academic career, he wrote fourteen history books.

Tansill published America Goes to War, a history book about World War I, in 1938. He finished his review by calling it, "a provocative and authoritative book, which should be on the "must list" of every student of the period."

In the 1930s, Tansill was a staunch isolationist, arguing that the United States should not participate in World War II. During a speech to the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1947, Tansill claimed that Abraham Lincoln was a "do-nothing" soldier and claimed that he had started the American Civil War by tricking the South into firing on Fort Sumter.

At the same time, he was an advisor to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. According to A. S. Winston, Tansill, "blamed Franklin Roosevelt for forcing a peace-minded Hitler into war and used the standard Rudolph Hess line that Hitler wanted only a free hand to deal with Bolshevism in the East."

In an article that he published in American Opinion, the journal of the John Birch Society, in 1963, a year before his death, Tansill suggested it would have made sense to impeach President John F. Kennedy after the latter suggested to the United Nations that the United States should disarm.