Walter A. Mcdougall
Walter A. McDougall is Professor of History and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. A graduate of Amherst College and a Vietnam veteran, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1974 and taught at U.C. Berkeley for 13 years before coming to Penn to direct its International Relations Program, which now has 350 majors.
McDougall teaches U.S., European, and Asia/Pacific diplomatic history and is the author of many books, most recently Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 (2004). His other recent books include Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776 (1997) and Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur (1993).
In 1986 Professor McDougall won the Pulitzer Prize for The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. He is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and editor of Orbis, its journal of world affairs.
Articles by this Contributor
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American Association for State and Local History
Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
