Bernadotte Everly Schmitt, a 1904 graduate of the University of Tennessee, won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize in history for The Coming of the War, 1914 (1930). He attended Oxford as the University of Tennessee's first Rhodes scholar, earning a B.A. (1908) and an M.A. (1913). In 1910 he received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and began teaching at Western Reserve University, where he remained until 1925. That year, he moved to the University of Chicago, where he was named the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor in 1939, a position he held until his retirement in 1946.
Schmitt divided his time between writing history books, a total of five, and editing the Journal of Modern History from 1929 to 1946. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1927 and three years later won the American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize for The Coming of the War, 1914. Schmitt received honorary doctorates from three universities. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, president of the American Historical Association (1960), and a member of the American Political Science Association and the American Philosophical Society. Schmitt died at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1969. The History Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, established a Chair of Excellence in his name in 1988.
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