 His works included "The Coming of the Civil War" (University of Chicago Press, 1942), "The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861" (LSU Press 1953) and "Reconstruction, and the Ending of the Civil War" (Holt Rinehart & Winston, Inc. 1968).He served as president of the Organization of Southern Historians in 1952, as president of the Mississippi Valley Historical Society and of the Organization of American Historians in 1963–1964.Craven was a leader of the "revisionist" historians in the 1930s who said the Civil War was caused by a failure of democracy.