William Hardy McNeill (October 31, 1917 – July 8, 2016)[4] was an American historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the
Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service
Professor Emeritus of History at the
University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.[5]
Early life and education
William McNeill was born in
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the son of theologian and educator
John T. McNeill, where he lived until age ten. The family then moved to Chicago, while spending summers on a family farm on Canada's
Prince Edward Island.[6]
He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938 from the
University of Chicago, where he was editor of the student newspaper and "was inspired by the anthropologist
Robert Redfield". He earned a Master of Arts degree in 1939, also at the University of Chicago, and wrote his thesis on
Thucydides and
Herodotus.[4] He began working towards a Ph.D. in history at
Cornell University under
Carl L. Becker. In 1941, he was drafted into the
U.S. Army and served in
World War II in the
European theater.[7][8] After the war, he returned to Cornell for his Ph.D., which he earned in 1947.[5]
Career
Teaching
In 1947, McNeill began teaching at the
University of Chicago, where he remained throughout his teaching career. He chaired the university's Department of History from 1961 to 1967, establishing its international reputation. During his tenure as chair, he recruited
Henry Moore to cast a
bronze statue called Nuclear Energy commemorating the University of Chicago as the place where the world's first manmade
nuclear chain reaction took place in 1942.[9]
In 1988 he was a visiting professor at
Williams College, where he taught a seminar on The Rise of the West.[10] He has stated that teaching "is the most wonderful way to learn things".[4] According to
John W. Boyer, the University of Chicago's Dean and a former student of McNeill's, McNeill was "one of the most important historians to teach at the University of Chicago in the twentieth century". He retired from teaching in 1987 and moved to
Colebrook, Connecticut.[6]
In a 1992 review, he disagreed with
Francis Fukuyama's argument in The End of History and the Last Man that the end of the
Cold War meant that the American model of a
capitalistliberal democracy had become the "final form of human government", as Fukuyama put it. In 1997 he disagreed with the central thesis of
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel for overlooking the importance of human "cultural autonomy" in determining human development versus Diamond's focus on environmental factors.[15][16] In 2003, he coauthored The Human Web: A Bird's-eye View of World History with his son and fellow historian
J. R. McNeill.[17][18]
In 2009, he won the
National Humanities Medal.[22] In February 2010, President
Barack Obama, a former University of Chicago instructor himself, awarded McNeill the
National Humanities Medal to recognize "his exceptional talent as a teacher and scholar at the University of Chicago and as an author of more than 20 books, including The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of
recorded history".[23]He wrote more that 20 books.[24]
Personal life
In 1946 McNeill married Elizabeth Darbishire, whom he met during his military service during
World War II as an assistant military attaché to the
Greek and
Yugoslavian governments-in-exile in
Cairo.[4] She died in 2006.[25] McNeill himself died in July 2016 at the age of 98 at Torrington, Connecticut.[6][26]
(1953) "America, Britain and Russia, Their Co-operation and Conflict, 1941–1946, Oxford University Press, under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970 [ISBN missing]
(1954) Past and Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[ISBN missing]
"The Introduction of the Potato into Ireland," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 21, No. 3, September 1949
(2005). Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History (with Jerry H. Bentley, David Christian et al., editors). 5 volumes. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.
ISBN978-0-9743091-0-1.
(2005). The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. [ISBN missing]
(2009). Summers Long Ago: On Grandfather's Farm and in Grandmother's Kitchen. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.
ISBN978-1-933782-71-3.
(2011). Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, 2nd Edition (with Jerry H. Bentley, David Christian et al., editors). 6 volumes. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.
ISBN978-1-933782-65-2.
The Changing Shape of World History, William H. McNeill, Paper originally presented at the History and Theory World History Conference, March 25–26, 1994.
Decline of the West?, William H. McNeill, Review of Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. The New York Review of Books. January 9, 1997.