took as an object lesson on how two fair-minded scholars can reach differing conclusions from the same sources. With his dissertation titled "The Latin American Policy of the Second Cleveland Administration" being accepted, LaFeber received his PhD from Wisconsin in 1959. Scholarship Cornell University hired LaFeber as an assistant professor in 1959. He became an associate professor in 1963. LaFeber found an engaging environment with a number of other up-and-coming figures in the history and government departments, including Allan Bloom, Theodore J. Lowi, and Joel H. Silbey among others. LaFeber's The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898, published in 1963, was a greatly expanded revision of his dissertation. It received the Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association; in fact the award was given based on the book having been read in manuscript form before publication. The work established LaFeber as a prominent scholar, and has remained a popular choice in academic circles for several decades. Historian Irwin Unger, writing in 1967, did not find much to like of Williams or the Wisconsin School overall, but did praise LaFeber as the best of them, a "sophisticated and urbane historian" who was "not a crude polemicist". Unger found it particularly notable that LaFeber did not vilify the people he identified as being behind much of American foreign policy. Indeed, in the preface to The New Empire, LaFeber writes: Finally, I must add that I have been profoundly impressed with the statesmen of these decades. ... I found both the policy makers and the businessmen of this era to be responsible, conscientious men who accepted the economic and social realities of their day, understood domestic and foreign problems, debated issues vigorously, and especially were unafraid to strike out on new and uncharted paths in order to create what they sincerely hoped would be a better nation and a better world. All this, however, is not to deny that the decisions of these men resulted in many unfortunate consequences for their twentieth-century descendants. LaFeber's publication did meet with some criticism. One later accounting of the Wisconsin School notes that in The New Empire, "LaFeber's arguments were sometimes questionable or overdrawn, and he acknowledged that he had passed by episodes that did not fit his pattern." LaFeber's next work, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1966 (1967), would end up going through ten editions (the last, America, Russia, and the Cold War,