Walter A. McDougall

• 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)

McDougall, Alexander (məkdū'gəl) , 1731–86, American Revolutionary political leader and general, b. Islay, Inner Hebrides, Scotland. He was taken (1738) as a child to New York. He became a fiery opponent of British restrictions on trade and helped to form the Sons of Liberty in New York City. In 1770 he was arrested on the charge of having written a seditious broadside. In 1774 he presided over the meeting that decided to send New York delegates to the Continental Congress. He served in the army throughout the Revolution and was notable in the battles of White Plains and Germantown and in the fighting in New Jersey. In 1780, after Benedict Arnold's treason, McDougall succeeded to the charge of West Point. After the war he was (1781–82, 1784–85) a member of Congress from New York.

(b. 1946)

1985	... the Heavens and Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. The University of California at Berkeley history professor's chronicle of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union wins the Pulitzer Prize.