Walter LaFeber (born 1933, Walkerton, Indiana) is Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History at Cornell University. He is one of the nation’s most distinguished historians of American Foreign Relations.
He 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 Department of State.
His The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (1963, 1998) received the Albert J. Beveridge Prize of the American Historical Association; Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (1984, 1992) received the Gustavus Meyers Prize, and 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's America, Russia, and the Cold War has been one of the most highly regarded histories of that huge conflict for over 35 years and is now in its 9th revised edition. LaFeber is known for providing Williams-like but more subtle and widely read revisionist histories of the Cold War in his books.
