John Pettegrew is a historian of late-19th and 20th century U.S. thought and culture. He is co-editor of the three- volume work, Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism; author and editor of A Pragmatist’s Progress: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History; and author of the bookBrutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890-1920, an examination of the putatively male instinct of aggressiveness as constructed in modern U.S. social science, law, literature, and sports and military cultures. His current research includes the optics of combat in the Iraq War, and the emergence of empathy in 20th-century social thought.