Randolph Greenfield Adams

Randolph Greenfield Adams (November 7, 1892 – January 4, 1951) was an American librarian and historian. He was the first director of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and served in that role for 28 years. He was a professor of history at the University of Michigan and focused on colonial America and the American Revolutionary War.

Early life and education Adams was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 7, 1892, to John Stokes Adams, and Heloise Root Adams.

Adams attended the Episcopal Academy and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1914 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. As an undergraduate, he was moderator of the Philomathean Society and oversaw the publication of A History of the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania (1913). He spent that summer in Europe and was in Berlin at the outbreak of World War I and returned home through Holland. He became an Graduate assistant at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago.

On June 7, 1917, he enlisted in the United States Army as a private. He was assigned to a base hospital in France with the University of Pennsylvania unit, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps. He was honorably discharged on May 5, 1919.

He became a Carnegie Fellow in international law at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his Ph.D. in history in 1920. His doctoral dissertation, Political Ideas of the American Revolution, was published in 1922.

He was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws degree from Albion College in 1938.

Career In 1920, he accepted a job as assistant professor of history at Trinity College (now known as Duke University), and worked there for three years. At the recommendation of librarian George Parker Winship, head of the Widener Library at Harvard University, Adams was interviewed by William L. Clements for the post of the director of the new library he was founding, the William L. Clements Library, a rare book and manuscript repository at the University of Michigan. Though he had no background or training as a librarian, his extensive historical knowledge and scholarship was coupled with a background in rare books, sparked in childhood by the collector A. Edward Newton, a friend of John Stokes Adams. He edited Selected Political Essays of James Wilson (1930) and contributed numerous entries to the Dictionary of American Biography and the Dictionary of American History, and served as editor of The Colophon and Quarto, the latter a publication of the Clements Library. In 1929, he was a visiting professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

He was active in the American Antiquarian Society, the American Historical Association, and the Grolier Club.

He died on January 4, 1951, of heart disease in Ann Arbor, Michigan,

Publications A History of the Philomathian Society of the University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, Philomathian Society, 1913 Political Ideas of The American Revolution, Durham, N.C.: Trinity College Press, 1922 A History of the Foreign Policy of the United States, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924 The Whys and Wherefores of the William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1925 Early American Printing, Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, 1927 Librarians as Enemies of Books, The Library Quarterly, Vol. III, No. 3, July 1937