Walter A. McDougall

Walter Allan McDougall (born December 3, 1946, in Washington, D.C.) is an American historian, currently a professor of history and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania.

McDougall graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College and fought in Vietnam before completing his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in 1974. He is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and also an editor of Orbis, the quarterly journal of world affairs published by the institute. In 2016, he published The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy.

McDougall's first book was France's Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914–1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (1978). In 1984 he co-edited The Grenada Papers. He also published Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur in 1993 and Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776 in 1997. In 2008 he published Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877, in which he covered all the major events and social forces of the Civil War era.

Walter A. McDougall was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Sigma chapter) and a Vietnam veteran.

McDougall and his wife, the former Jonna Van Zanten have two children, Angela and Christopher, and reside in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. His interests include books, music from J.S. Bach to Bob Dylan, chess, baseball, bridge, golf and C.S. Lewis.