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.

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.

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.

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.

LaFeber and his wife, Sandra, have two children, Scott and Suzanne.

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.

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