William Hardy McNeill (October 31, 1917 – July 8, 2016)[4] was an American historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963).

He was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.

[7] He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938 from the University of Chicago, where he was editor of the student newspaper and "was inspired by the anthropologist Robert Redfield".

[7] McNeill's best-known work is The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, which was published in 1963, relatively early in his career.

It had a major impact on historical theory by emphasizing cultural fusions, in contrast to Oswald Spengler's view of discrete, independent civilizations.

His Plagues and Peoples (1976), was an important early contribution to the study of the impact of disease on human history.

[7] In 1996, McNeill won the prestigious Erasmus Prize, which the Crown Prince of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander presented to him at Amsterdam's Royal Palace.

[23] In February 2010, President Barack Obama, a former University of Chicago instructor himself, awarded McNeill the National Humanities Medal to recognize "his exceptional talent as a teacher and scholar at the University of Chicago and as an author of more than 20 books, including The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of recorded history".