Harrington had used). At its peak, the course attracted more than 400 students and lectures were sometimes held in the large Bailey Hall to accommodate them. He spoke softly for whatever room he was in, so as to force students to be absolutely quiet in order to hear him. While other revisionists focused more on ideological or institutional forces, LaFeber made his scholarship and his lectures memorable by stressing the role of individuals, from his narrative hero John Quincy Adams to a few Cornell-related figures such as Willard Straight. Throughout his career LaFeber was concerned with teaching students critical thinking skills in historical analysis rather than gaining converts to his viewpoint, and accordingly even those who did not always agree with the markets-oriented interpretations advanced in his lectures still found them compelling. LaFeber's classes typically ended to pronounced ovations. In 2013, the American Historical Association would write of this course that, despite his publishing achievements, "LaFeber might be even more distinguished as a teacher: one for whom the overworked adjective 'legendary' is entirely fitting. Without eyewitnesses, would we trust accounts that his upper-division lecture course regularly drew 300-plus students each Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday? ... Or that he continued running discussion sections and grading papers for that huge class when he could have easily avoided it?" In May 1976, during the year of the United States Bicentennial, Cornell University broke with an over-100-year-old tradition: Instead of the university president or another administrator delivering the commencement address, LaFeber became the first faculty member to give it. Cornell president Dale R. Corson later explained the reason: "It was the bicentennial. I felt that something significant should be said by someone who could say it with authority." In his address at Schoellkopf Field, LaFeber highlighted the similarities of Cornell founders Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to the founders of the nation, saying they shared a common passion in the belief of the power of ideas, but stressed that Cornell and White were part of the expanding of human rights to groups the founders had excluded, thus leading the university to take on the role of "midwife when revolutionary ideas enter an un-revolutionary society." LaFeber switched to half-time teaching in 1989, giving classes in the fall but reserving the spring for researching and writing. He began doing less than that in the 1990s, but then was offered the Andrew H. and James S.