About the Author

Carroll Quigley was born in Boston and attended Harvard University, where he studied history and earned B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. He taught at Princeton University, at Harvard, and then at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 1941 to 1976.

After teaching at Princeton and Harvard, Quigley came to Georgetown University in 1941 and became an on-line resource for Washington. He lectured at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the Brookings Institution, the Stare Department's Foreign Service Institute and consulted with the Smithsonian and the Senate Select Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences.

In addition to his academic work, Quigley served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, the Smithsonian Institution, and the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration in the 1950s. He was also a book reviewer for The Washington Star, and a contributor and editorial board member of Current History. Quigley said of himself that he was a conservative defending the liberal tradition of the West. He was an early and fierce critic of the Vietnam War, and he opposed the activities of the military-industrial complex.

As such, in 1961 Quigley published the book The Evolution of Civilizations. It was derived from a course he taught on world history at Georgetown University. The scope of The Evolution of Civilizations was wide-ranging, covering the whole of man's activities throughout time. It was analytic, not merely descriptive. It attempted a categorization of man's activities in sequential fashion so as to provide a causal explanation of the stages of civilization. Quigley coupled enormous capacity for work with a peculiarly "scientific" approach. He believed that it should be possible to examine the data and draw conclusions.

In 1966, Macmillan Company published Tragedy and Hope, a work of exceptional scholarship depicting the history of the world between 1895 and 1965 as seen through the eyes of Quigley. Tragedy and Hope was a commanding work, 20 years in the writing, that added to Quigley's considerable national reputation as a historian. Tragedy and Hope reflected Quigley's feeling that "Western civilization is going down the drain." That was the tragedy. When the book came out in 1966, Quigley honestly thought the whole show could he salvaged; that was his hope.