Ronald H. Spector

Ronald Harvey Spector is an American military historian. He was formerly a professor at George Washington University.

Military career

He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served in the Vietnam War, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the reserves. He was a historian at the United States Army Center of Military History and taught at the University of Alabama. He was tasked to prepare a study of the Grenada operation.

He graduated from Johns Hopkins University, and later gained a Ph.D from Yale University.

Spector was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in India from 1977 to 1978. He has taught at the National War College, the University of Alabama, and the U.S. Army War College. He currently is serving on the faculty of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is also a contributing writer for the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Spector joined the State Department's Historical Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation in the late 1980s as a representative of the American Historical Association. At the 1989 meeting, Spector and other members discussed expediting the publication of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series and improving the process of classifying and declassifying documents. He advocated reprinting and distributing the 20 backlogged volumes of FRUS to depository libraries, and suggested lobbying Congress for funding for this purpose. Spector also expressed his views on the need to maintain a complete historical record.

In 2012, Spector was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize, for his breadth of contributions to the field of military history. His book Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan was the 1986 winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Prize in Naval History.

Organizations	Year	Category	Work	Result
The New York Council of the Navy League of the United States	1986	Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Prize in Naval History	Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan	Won
Society for Military History	2001	Distinguished Book Awards	At War, at Sea: Sailors and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century	Won
Society for Military History	2002	Distinguished Book Awards	The Oxford Companion to American Military History	Won
Society for Military History	2012	Samuel Eliot Morison Prize	—