Renowned Historian; Award-Winning Teacher and Public Lecturer; News Analyst
It’s true, I wanted to be a historian by the time I entered first grade. Football coach was second. My bookshelves quickly filled with tales of World War II, Rome’s rise and fall, or anything involving a ship or a plane. Dreams sometimes do come true, even for bookworms. Decades later I direct the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Raised in the entirely normal combination of Philadelphia and Omaha, and educated at Cornell University, I had the honor of studying under Walter LaFeber and Tim Borstelmann, before continuing my studies at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, and then ultimately completing my doctorate in American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the sage direction of Thomas J. McCormick.
Yale University came next, as a John M. Olin Postdoctoral Fellow in International Security Studies, as did the opportunity to teach history and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and Haverford College.
Texas soon came calling, as did service until 2012 at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government & Public Service as the Howard and Verlin Kruse ’52 Professor and Director of Programming for the Scowcroft Institute for International Affairs, during which time I received a Silver Star Award for Teaching and Mentorship, a Distinguished Teaching Award from A&M’s Association of Former Students, and a Texas A&M University System Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award.
Author or editor of ten books on American foreign policy, I’ve written on the Cold War and especially its surprisingly peaceful end, America’s relations with the world, and about those who occupy the highest office in the land—and still the most powerful in the world—the American presidency, which I’ve had the honor of discussing around the world.
In 2017 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War, and when not cooking for my family, offering historical perspective to current events, or second-guessing coaching decisions, I’m currently hard at work on Seeking Monsters to Destroy: How America Goes to War, from Jefferson to Obama (Oxford University Press).
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