2027 LCpl. Benjamin W. Schmidt Symposium

William I. Hitchcock is the author of five books on the global history of the 20^th century, particularly the two World Wars and the Cold War.

Professor Hitchcock’s most recent book is A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America’s World War II, published by Simon and Schuster in 2026. His earlier books include: The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (Simon and Schuster, 2018), which was a New York Times bestseller, and The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Free Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize, and a Financial Times bestseller in the UK.

He is also the author of The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-present (Doubleday/Anchor, 2002) and France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe (UNC, 1998), and he is the co-editor of From War to Peace: Altered Strategic Landscapes in the 20^th Century (Yale, 2000).

Professor Hitchcock has been a Fulbright Scholar to Belgium, and he has won numerous fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Nobel Institute, Yale University, Harvard University, and the MacArthur Foundation. At UVA, he teaches courses on war and society, the World Wars, the Cold War, and strategy and diplomacy.