Lawrence S. Wittner

Lawrence S. Wittner (born May 5, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American historian who has written extensively on peace movements, foreign policy, and economic inequality.

He attended Columbia College (B.A., 1962), the University of Wisconsin (M.A. in history, 1963), and Columbia University (Ph.D. in history, 1967). Subsequently, he taught at Hampton Institute, at Vassar College, and—under the Fulbright program—at Japanese universities. In 1974, he began teaching at the State University of New York/Albany, where he rose to the rank of Professor of History before his retirement in 2010.

Wittner is the author of nine books, the editor or co-editor of another four, and the author of approximately 400 published articles and book reviews. From 1984 to 1987, he edited Peace & Change, a journal of peace research. His article "Peace Movements and Foreign Policy" won the Charles DeBenedetti award of the Conference on Peace Research in History in 1989, and his One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953 received the Warren Kuehl Book Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1995. He received the New York State/United University Professions Excellence Award for scholarship, teaching, and service in 1990 and the Peace History Society's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.

A former president of the Council on Peace Research in History (now the Peace History Society), an affiliate of the American Historical Association, Wittner also chaired the Peace History Commission of the International Peace Research Association.

He has received major fellowships or grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Aspen Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the United States Institute of Peace.

Wittner has spoken at the United Nations and at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, delivered guest lectures on dozens of college and university campuses (including Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Yale University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, the University of Colorado, the University of Wisconsin, American University, the University of Maine, the University of Connecticut, the University of Utah, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of New Mexico, Swarthmore College, the College of William and Mary, Colgate University, and the University of Alaska Southeast), and given talks in numerous countries (including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland).

Blending intellectual life with political activity, Wittner has been active since 1961 in the racial equality, labor, and peace movements. He was an early civil rights and anti-apartheid activist and served for decades as an elected leader of United University Professions (the SUNY faculty union that is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers). In 2016, he was elected by Democratic Party voters of New York's 20th Congressional district to serve as a Bernie Sanders delegate to the Democratic national convention. Currently, he is a board member of the Citizens for Global Solutions Education Fund, a board member of the Peace Action Fund of New York State, and a member of the executive committee of the Albany County Central Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. On occasion, he performs vocally and on the banjo with the Solidarity Singers, who enliven a variety of events—in prisons, on picket lines, and at meetings of the American Historical Association—with their music.