Lawrence Wittner was born in 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Columbia College, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in History in 1967. Since then he has taught at Hampton Institute, at Vassar College, at Japanese universities (under the Fulbright program), and at the State University of New York/Albany, where he is currently Professor of History.
A former president of the Council on Peace Research in History (now the Peace History Society), he has written extensively on the history of peace movements and foreign policy and is considered one of the world’s leading peace researchers. Probably his best-known work is the widely-acclaimed trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, a very favorable history of the activity and impact of the worldwide nuclear disarmament movement.
Larry began his role as a peace activist in the fall of 1961, when he joined other college students picketing the White House in an attempt to block resumption of U.S. nuclear testing. Subsequently, as a member of SANE and, later, Peace Action, he has taken part in many protest activities against the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, the Iraq War, and other militarist ventures. Larry is a member of the Steering Committee of Upper Hudson Peace Action. He also currently serves on the national board of Peace Action
Numerous peace organizations have drawn upon him as a speaker, and in recent years he has addressed an International Peace Bureau conference in Barcelona, nuclear disarmament gatherings in Tokyo and Hiroshima, the NGO Committee on Disarmament at the United Nations, and the Peace Action national convention in Princeton, New Jersey.
He has also been active in the racial equality and labor movements. Through his leadership role in his SUNY faculty-staff union – the 30,000-member United University Professions, the largest higher education union in the United States and an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers – he helped shepherd through resolutions at statewide union conventions endorsing the Campaign for a New Foreign Policy, condemning the Iraq War, and calling upon the AFL-CIO to demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that conflict. He also performs (instrumentally and vocally) with the Solidarity Singers at peace and social justice gatherings.