Walter McDougall

Walter A. McDougall is Professor of History and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations. A graduate of Amherst College and a Vietnam veteran, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1974 and taught at the University of California, Berkeley for thirteen years before accepting a chair at Penn and becoming the faculty director of  its International Relations Program.

McDougall’s popular lecture courses include surveys on American, European, and Asia/Pacific diplomatic as well as a survey called The Ascent of Europe from the Renaissance to the Twenty-first Century.

He has published a dozen books (most of them are four hundred pages or longer!).  They include ... the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985), which won a Pulitzer Prize, 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),  Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828 (2004), Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era (2007), and The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (2016).  Most recently he published Gems of American History: The Lecturer’s Art  (2025).  He has also served as a Senior Fellow and Director of Research for Philadelphia’s Foreign Policy Research Interest since 1990 and erstwhile editor of Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs.

Happily married with two grown children, McDougall’s interests include books, musical genres from Bach to Bob Dylan, Chicago sports teams, a sense of humor, and C. S. Lewis