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Walter LaFeber (born 1933 in Walkerton, Indiana) was a Marie Underhill Noll Professor and a Steven Weisse Presidential Teaching Fellow of History at Cornell University. He is one of the nation’s most distinguished historians of United States Foreign Relations.

The son of a grocer, he received his BA from Hanover College in 1955, his MA from Stanford University in 1956 and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1959, after which Cornell hired him.

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 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 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's America, Russia, and the Cold War has been one of the most highly regarded histories of that huge conflict since it was first published in 1966; it is now in its 10th revised edition. LaFeber is known for providing Williams-like but more subtle and widely read revisionist histories of the Cold War in his books.

At the end of the Spring 2006 semester, LaFeber retired after forty-six years on the Cornell faculty. To mark the end of his career, he gave one final lecture on April 25 to an over 3,000 person gathering of former students, Cornell alumni, and colleagues at the Beacon Theater in New York City.

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

• Walter LaFeber's last lecture