Bernadotte Everly Schmitt

Bernadotte Everly Schmitt (May 19, 1886 – March 23, 1969) was an American historian.

Biography

He received his Master of Arts from the University of Oxford and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1916 he gained notice with England and Germany, 1740-1914. His book The Coming of the War, 1914 won him the Pulitzer Prize for History and the George Beer Prize. This work, for which he remains best known, took issue with the equally prominent study of the origins of the First World War published two years earlier by Sidney Fay (for which its author had also won a Beer Prize). In contrast to Fay's argument that Serbia and Russia were culpable, Schmitt insisted that Germany had indeed been largely responsible for the catastrophe. The debate between the "orthodox" school represented by Schmitt, Luigi Albertini and Pierre Renouvin, and the "revisionist" school of Fay, Harry Elmer Barnes and others that shifted blame from the Central Powers to the Allies, dominated scholarship on the "war-guilt" question until the publication of Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht in 1961.^[2] Schmitt was the first editor of the Journal of Modern History, having served from 1929 to 1946. In 1960, he was President of the American Historical Association. He died in 1969.^[3]

References

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Americana (Volume 24: 1969) page 384.