• Born: 1946

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 PhD from the University of Chicago in 1974 and taught at the University of California at Berkeley for 13 years before joining the University of Pennsylvania as director of its International Relations Program. He is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and editor of Orbis, its journal of world affairs. In 1986 McDougall won the Pulitzer Prize for The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age.

McDougall teaches US, European, and Asia/Pacific diplomatic history and is the author of many books, including Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur (1993), Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776 (1997), and Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 (2004).

Most Famous Works

• ... the Heavens and Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985)