Bernadotte Everly Schmitt

Bernadotte Everly Schmitt (May 19, 1886 – March 23, 1969) was a historian of Europe. He was professor of Modern European History at the University of Chicago from 1924 until 1946.

Professor Schmitt 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 (published in 1930) won him the 1930 George Louis Beer Prize and the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for History.

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 (Germany's Aims in the First World War) (1961), which reopened the debate with a fresh approach by blaming Germany's prewar ambitions. Schmitt was the first editor of the Journal of Modern History, serving from 1929 to 1946. In 1937 Schmitt published The Annexation of Bosnia, 1908-1909.

In 1960, he was President of the American Historical Association. He died in 1969.

The American Historical Association offers the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grants to support research in the history of Europe, Africa, and Asia. The funds for this program come from the earnings of a bequest from Bernadotte E. Schmitt. These competitive annual grants are intended to further research in progress and may be used for travel to a library or archive, for microfilms, photographs, or photocopying.