Professor Randall was a great advisor and a great mentor. He taught me I think in the best possible way. He was not a brilliant lecturer. His courses were fairly pedestrian. I didn’t think his seminars were particularly interesting, but working with him on a one‑to‑one basis as his assistant, I think that’s the way one has to learn to be a historian; that is, he was writing, and if he needed some particular reference, I had to go find it and get it. If he was writing, he wanted everything checked meticulously over and over again. So I had to take the manuscript over to the library and check it all out. So that by working closely with him, I got to see, first of all, a lot of the library and its extensive holdings, but I got, even more important, to understand what a scholar is about. It is about care. It is about painstaking. It is about judgment, as well as it’s about very skillful writing. He was an excellent writer as well.