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William Hardy McNeill was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on October 31, 1917. He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from the University of Chicago. He was drafted in 1941 and served with the Army in Hawaii and the Caribbean and as assistant military attaché to the Greek and Yugoslavian governments-in-exile in Cairo, Egypt. After the war, he received a doctorate from Cornell University. He was a history professor at the University of Chicago from 1947 until he retired in 1987. He wrote more than 20 books during his lifetime including Plagues and Peoples; The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000; Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, Hutchins' University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929-1950; and Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community won the 1963 National Book Award for history and the Gordon J. Laing Prize of the University of Chicago. He was the co-author of The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History with his son John Robert McNeill. He also wrote a memoir entitled The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir. He was one of the editors of the Readings in World History Series published by Oxford University Press. He died on July 8, 2016 at the age of 98. (Bowker Author Biography) — biography from Plagues and Peoples… (more)
Plagues and Peoples 1,816 copies, 20 reviews
A World History 194 copies, 1 review
The Islamic World 105 copies, 1 review
Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life 59 copies, 3 reviews
Mythistory and Other Essays 50 copies, 1 review
The Shape of European History 32 copies, 2 reviews
Medieval Europe 27 copies
The Origins of Civilization 24 copies, 1 review
Classical China 17 copies
Classical India (Editor) 16 copies
Past and Future 10 copies
Modern Asia and Africa (Editor) 5 copies, 1 review
Modern Europe and America 4 copies, 1 review
The Bridge on the Drina (Introduction, some editions) 2,275 copies, 65 reviews
Maps of Time : An Introduction to Big History (Foreword, some editions) 595 copies, 12 reviews
I Wish I'd Been There, Book Two: European History (Contributor) 151 copies, 4 reviews
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History — Spring 1998 (Author "Infectious Alternatives") 14 copies
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History — Winter 1995 (Author "Keeping Together in Time") 9 copies
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Short biography
William H. McNeill was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, the son of a Presbyterian minister and historian of Christianity. He graduated from the University of Chicago, where he was editor of the student newspaper, in 1938, and earned a master’s degree with a thesis on Thucydides and Herodotus.

In 1941, during World War II, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. After the war, he earned a doctorate in history at Cornell University and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he remained until his retirement in 1987.
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