He was awarded the gold medal, given once a decade, by the National Institute of Arts and Letters for his work in history, and he received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Lehigh University.

[1] Along with Herbert L. Osgood of Columbia University, Andrews led a new approach to American colonial history, which has been called the "imperial" interpretation.

Andrews and Osgood emphasized the colonies' imperial ties to Great Britain, and both wrote seminal articles on the subject in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1898.

[1] Andrews' thorough research into archival sources, and a demonstration of scholarship through many books and articles, set a standard that led his colleagues to praise him as the "dean" of colonial historians.

[6] Among his students at Yale who went on to become colonial historians and future leaders of the "imperial" school were Leonard Woods Labaree, Lawrence Henry Gipson, Isabel M. Calder, and Beverley W. Bond, Jr.