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Education
- Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University
- M.A. in History from Northwestern University
- A.B. from Brown University
Research
- United States; Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
- United States and the World
- Politics, Media, and Popular Culture
Chester Pach is a Professor in the Department of History. He specializes in the history of U.S. involvement in world affairs and recent U.S. history. His research has focused on U.S. involvement in the Cold War and the Vietnam War as well as the Eisenhower, Johnson, and Reagan presidencies. He has a particular interest in television coverage of international issues and the intersections between politics, popular culture, and international history.
In 1995, he was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is the winner of the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award for 2005-6 and gave the address at the Graduate Commencement on June 9, 2006. In 2016, he received the Jeanette G. Grasselli Brown Faculty Teaching Award in the Humanities.
Professor Pach has served on several committees of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of H-DIPLO, a part of the HNET Electronic Discussion Network.
Publications
He is completing The Presidency of Ronald Reagan in the American Presidency Series for the University Press of Kansas. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation, and the Baker Fund of Ohio University to support his research and writing.
Books
Milestone Documents of American Presidents , editor (Schlager, 2025)
A Companion to Dwight D. Eisenhower , editor (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017)
Presidential Profiles: The Johnson Years (Facts on File, 2006)
The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower , rev.ed. (University Press of Kansas, 1991)
Arming the Free World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945-1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 1991)
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“The US News Media and Vietnam,” Cambridge History of the Vietnam War , volume 2: Escalation and Stalemate, editor, Andrew Preston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
“The Long Goodbye: Mourning and Remembering Ronald Reagan,” in Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture , eds. Lindsay Chervinsky and Matthew Costello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023)
“Ronald Reagan’s Noble Causes,” Ronald Reagan Institute Essay Series on Presidential Principles and Belief s (February 2023)
“The United States and the Early Cold War, 1945-1961,” (revised and updated) in The SHAFR Guide Online: An Annotated Bibliography of U.S. Foreign Relations since 1600 , (Boston: Brill, 2022)
“ Journalism and US Foreign Policy ,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia, American History (August 2019)
“ Ronald Reagan and Supply-Side Economics ,” Chapter 16: “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Bill of Rights Institute, 2018
“ The Iran-Contra Affair ,” Chapter 16: “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Bill of Rights Institute, 2018
“ Lyndon Johnson’s Living Room War ,” New York Times , May 30, 2017
“Reputation and Legacies: An American Symbol,” in Companion to Ronald Reagan , ed. Andrew L. Johns (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015)
“ Public Learned Less After Media Was Blamed for Failure in Vietnam ,” Room for Debate, New York Times , April 29, 2015
“ Before ‘Morning in America’: Reagan and the Pivotal Year of 1983 ,” Ripon Forum 45 (Winter 2011)
“‘We Need to Get a Better Story to the American People’: LBJ, the Progress Campaign, and the Vietnam War on Television,” Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century , eds. Andrew K. Frank and Kenneth Osgood (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010)
“‘Our Worst Enemy Seems to Be the Press’: TV News, Vietnamization, and U.S. Withdrawal from Vietnam, 1969-73,” Diplomatic History (June 2010)
Teaching
Chester Pach teaches courses on U.S. involvement in world affairs and recent U.S. history. His courses include:
- HIST 3164: History of U.S. Involvement in World Affairs, 1945-Present
- HIST 3220: The United States in the 1960s
- HIST 3224: The United States in the 1980s: The Age of Reagan and Madonna
- HIST 6800: Research Seminar in History
- HIST 6901: Colloquium in United States History