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Peter Paret

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Peter Paret (April 13, 1924-) is American military and art history historian with a particular interest in the German history. Paret was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Dr. Hans Paret and Suzanne Aimée Cassirer. The Jewish Parets fled Nazi Germany and arrived in the United States in 1942.

During World War Two, Paret served in the United States Army between 1943-1946 in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Korea. During the 1950s, Paret worked as a journalist before turning towards writing history. Paret received a BA at the University of California in 1943 and a PhD at the University of London in 1960, where he studied under Michael Howard. Paret has taught at Princeton University (1960-1962 & 1963-1965), the University of California (1962-1963 & 1966-1969), Stanford University (1969-1986), the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, School of Historical Studies (1986-1997) and as a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace (1988-1993). At present, Paret works at the Institute for Advanced Study. His wife Isabel Harris is an psychologist by who he has two children, one of whom Paul Paret is also a historian.

Paret belonged to a generation of World War Two veterans who used their experience of the war to better understand military history. Paret’s major interests are how art of particular time and period co-relates to ideology and the society in which the artist lives, and how politics and intellectual trends interact with war and vice-versa. An major interest for Paret is the theories of the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz. In 1962, Paret launched the so-called "Clausewitz Project" at Princeton University in order to improve the historical understanding of Clausewitz. The translation of Vom Krieg into English by Paret and Howard in 1976 is generally considered to be the best translation.

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