FPRI’s Walter McDougall: “Father of New Look Revisionism”

April 15, 2010

FPRI’s Walter McDougall became a “dad” of sorts when the prominent writer Walter Russell Mead of Yale University and the Council on Foreign Relations described him in an essay in the Claremont Review of Books (Winter 2009/10) as “the father of New Look revisionism,” by which he meant that McDougall led a revolution in re-interpreting the history of American foreign policy. The scholarship of McDougall and those who followed, according to Mead, is “changing the way the history of American foreign policy is taught at many leading universities, and over time it is likely to change the way policymakers think about and craft foreign policy in the 21st century.” He said that McDougall’s 1997 book Promised Land, Crusader State “challenged two generations of received scholarly wisdom.”

Besides teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, McDougall is a Senior Fellow at FPRI and co-chair of our History Institute for Teachers. His earlier book The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age won a Pulitzer Prize. His two most recent books are accounts of U.S. history: Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877.  But don't forget his other major work: Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur. His FPRI essays — all classics — can all be found at www.fpri.org/byauthor.html#mcdougall.

• For more information contact Alan Luxenberg, Tel: 215 732 3774, ext 105 or lux@fpri.org.
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