100th Anniversary of World War I
Dr. David A. Smith is a senior lecturer in American history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He received his undergraduate degree from Texas State University in San Marcos, and his Ph.D. in modern American history from the University of Missouri in the year 2000.
In addition to his work at Baylor, he has been a fleet professor for the Naval War College since 2002.
He is the author of a biography of George Patton, a book on presidential leadership in the 19th Century, and is currently working on a new biography of Audie Murphy. He has contributed many essays to larger studies of leadership, World War One, and the navies of European colonial powers in the 17th and 18th Centuries.
He also writes about art and culture in history and is the author of Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy. His essays on art, culture, history and politics have appeared in the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman, and he writes a weekly column on arts and culture that appears in the Waco Tribune-Herald.
He has spoken at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and to civic organizations ranging from art galleries to the Rotary Club, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, the Fort Worth World Affairs Council, and the Audie Murphy Museum-World War II Museum. His book reviews have appeared in outlets from the Washington Times to the Naval War College Review.
He has won awards for his teaching at Baylor and at the University of Missouri.