Bernadotte Everly Schmitt (May 19, 1886 – March 23, 1969) was an American historian who was professor of Modern European History at the University of Chicago from 1924 to 1946.

[1] This work, for which he remains best known, took issue with the equally prominent study of the origins of the First World War published two years earlier by Sidney Fay (for which its author had also won a Beer Prize).

In contrast to Fay's argument that Serbia and Russia were culpable, Schmitt insisted that Germany had indeed been largely responsible for the catastrophe.

The debate between the "orthodox" school represented by Schmitt, Luigi Albertini and Pierre Renouvin, and the "revisionist" school of Fay, Harry Elmer Barnes and others that shifted blame from the Central Powers to the Allies, dominated scholarship on the "war-guilt" question until the publication of Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany's Aims in the First World War) (1961), which reopened the debate with a fresh approach by blaming Germany's prewar ambitions.

[13] The American Historical Association offers the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grants to support research in the history of Europe, Africa, and Asia.