Name Walter LaFeber | Role Historian | |
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Children Suzanne LaFeber, Scott LaFeber Parents Ralph Nichols LaFeber, Helen LaFeber Education University of Wisconsin-Madison (1959), Hanover College, Stanford University Awards Bancroft Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books The New Empire: An Interpreta, Michael Jordan and the New, Inevitable revolutions, The American age, The Clash Similar People William Appleman Williams, Akira Iriye, Bradford Perkins, Nancy Woloch, Lyndon B Johnson | ||
Walter lafeber
Walter "Walt" LaFeber (born August 30, 1933 in Walkerton, Indiana) is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor Emeritus of History and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the Department of History at Cornell University.
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He is one of the United States' most distinguished historians, a leader of the historical revisionism school of the history of U.S. foreign policy, and a member of the "Wisconsin School" of the New Left along with Lloyd Gardner and Thomas J. McCormick. LaFeber is known for providing widely read revisionist histories of the Cold War with views like William Appleman Williams but more subtle.
Education
The son of a grocer, he received his BA from Hanover College in 1955, his MA from Stanford University in 1956 and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1959, under Williams.
Career
Cornell University then hired him as an assistant professor and then as a full professor in 1967. He gained the Noll Professorship in 1968 and became the first recipient of the John M. Clark Teaching Award at Cornell. His History of Foreign Relations class achieved a reputation as one of the toughest and most popular courses on campus.
Personal life
LaFeber and his wife, Sandra, have two children, Scott and Suzanne.
Academic career
LaFeber's The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (1963, 1998) received the Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-2006 (1966) is currently in its 10th edition (2006). Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (1984, 1992) received the Gustavus Meyers Prize. The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750 (1989, 1994) became a New Left textbook. The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History (1997) received both the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Ellis Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians.
LaFeber examined the effect of modern sports and communication empires in his book, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (1999, 2002), which analyzes the rise in popularity of basketball, Michael Jordan, Nike and cable satellite networks and their relation to globalization.
LaFeber is past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also served on numerous scholarly editorial boards and the Advisory Committee to the Historical Division of the U.S. Department of State.
LaFeber retired in 2006 after 46 years on the Cornell faculty. His final lecture on April 25, 2006 was given to a 3,000-person gathering of former students, Cornell alumni, and colleagues at the Beacon Theater in New York City.