Faculty

Thomas Alan Schwartz
Professor of History
Associate Chair, Department of History
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of History

PhD, Harvard, 1985

History of American Foreign Relations; International Relations; Twentieth Century American history; Modern European history; History of the U.S. Presidency

Telephone 615-343-4328
Email: thomas.a.schwartz@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: T 3:00-5:00 pm, W 10:30-12:30, by appointment
Office: Benson Hall 102

Thomas Alan Schwartz is a historian of the foreign relations of the United States, with related interests in Modern European history and the history of international relations.   He is the author of America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Harvard, 1991), which was translated into German, Die Atlantik Brücke (Ullstein, 1992).  The book examined the “dual containment” policy of the United States in Germany, a policy which sought to integrate Germany into the West while using her resources and strength to contain the Soviet Union.   This book received the Stuart Bernath Book Prize of the Society of American Foreign Relations, and the Harry S. Truman Book Award, given by the Truman Presidential Library.  He is also the author of Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Harvard, 2003), which examined the Johnson Administration’s policy toward Europe and assessed the impact of the war in Vietnam on its other foreign policy objectives.  He is the co-editor with Matthias Schulz of The Strained Alliance: U.S.-European Relations in the 1970s, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. He is currently working on two books: a biography of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, tentatively entitled, Henry Kissinger and the Dilemmas of American Power, and The Long Twilight Struggle: A Concise History of the Cold War.

Professor Schwartz has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the German Historical Society, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Center for the Study of European Integration.  He the President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. He serves on the United States Department of State’s Historical Advisory Committee as the representative of the Organization of American Historians.  In 2008 Professor Schwartz received the Annual Alumni Education Award from the Vanderbilt Alumni Association.

 

 

 

The photo at the left shows The State Department's Historical Advisory Committee meeting with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, December 2005.

 

Professor Schwartz taught for five years at Harvard University, and has been teaching at Vanderbilt since 1990.  While at Vanderbilt he has developed courses dealing with the United States and the Vietnam War as well a course within Jewish Studies entitled, “Power and Diplomacy in the Modern Middle East.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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