David S. Patterson is the author of two books Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement and The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I. 

Patterson’s career as an academic and government historian includes teaching diplomatic history, peace history, and women’s history at major universities and his service for several years as chief editor of U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Relations of the United States, a long-standing, multi-volume documentary series. 

His work on the Pinchot family is an outgrowth of his growing concerns about the global environmental challenges, which Gifford Pinchot first confronted more than a century ago, and his ongoing research into Amos Pinchot’s commitment to civil liberties and antiwar movements. 

Among his awards, Patterson was the recipient of a Mershon Social Science Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities travel grant. While teaching in China, he was named the Sir Run Run Shaw Professor of American History at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. More recently, he served as a visiting fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. He has a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Besides history, his other passions include choral singing, golf, and, like the Pinchots, the central importance of family. Patterson and his wife live in Maryland, within commuting distance of their son and wife and grandchildren.