Walter A. McDougall is the Co-Chair of FPRI’s Madeleine and W.W. Keen Butcher History Institute and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His honors include a Pulitzer Prize, election to the Society of American Historians, and appointment to the Library of Congress Council of Scholars. 

 

After service in the U.S. Army artillery during the Vietnam War, McDougall took a PhD under world historian William H. McNeill at the University of Chicago (1974).  The following year he was hired by the University of California, Berkeley, and taught there until 1988, when he was offered the chair at Penn.  

 

His articles and columns have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Commentary, and other national publications.  An unabashed generalist, his books range from France’s Rhineland Diplomacy 1914-1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (1978), and …the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985), to Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific From Magellan to MacArthur (1992), Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (1997), Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828 (2004), and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 (2008), which was chosen by the Athenaeum of Philadelphia as best book of the year by a local author. 

 

His latest book is The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (Yale University Press, 2016), which has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, and Liberty and Law. 

 

McDougall is also Chairman of FPRI’s Board of Advisors and our Center for the Study of America and the West.