Although no longer teaching at Chicago, he remained a non-resident professor of the university,[1] and in 1932 he succeeded Dexter Perkins as executive secretary of the American Historical Association.
[1][9] Read's first major research project was his edition of the Bardon Papers, documents relating to the imprisonment and trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, published in London in the Camden Series in 1909.
[10] In 1925 he published the monumental Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth in three volumes,[11] described in the American Historical Review as "the ripe fruition of upwards of two decades of exhaustive research".
[12] Before the entry of the United States into World War II, Read chaired the Pennsylvania branch of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.
In 1949, at the time of the Cold War, Read was elected president of the American Historical Association, and his presidential address was widely reported.
Discipline is the essential prerequisite of every effective army, whether it marches under the Stars and Stripes or under the Hammer and Sickle... Total war, whether it be hot or cold, enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part.
[17] When the progressive Merle Curti became president of the association in 1954, he directly challenged the position taken up by Read and his successor Samuel Eliot Morison, in an address which George Rawick called "one of the most remarkable experiences of my life".
[20] The first volume of the work was published in 1955 as Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth[21] and was awarded a Folger Shakespeare Library prize worth $1,000.