Professor Spector received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins and his MA and Ph.D. from Yale.
He has served in various government positions and on active duty in the Marine Corps from 1967-1969 and 1983-1984 and was the first civilian to become Director of Naval History and the head of the Naval Historical Center. He has served on the faculties of LSU, Alabama and Princeton and has been a senior Fulbright lecturer in India and Israel. In 1995-1996 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Strategy at the National War College and was the Distinguished Guest Professor at Keio University, Tokyo in 2000.
Books in order of publication:
Professors of War: The Naval College and the Development of the Naval Profession (1977)
Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941-1960 – The U.S. Army in Vietnam, Volume 1 (1983)
Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan. New York: Free Press and Macmillan, 1984.
Admiral of the New Empire: The Life and Career of George Dewey (1974, second edition 1988)
After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 1993.
The Oxford Companion to American Military History. New York: Oxford University Press: 1999. Co-edited with Fred Anderson, John W. Chambers, Lynn Eden and Joseph Glatthaar.
At War at Sea: Sailors and Naval Warfare in the Twentieth Century. New York: Viking Press, 2001.
In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia. New York: Random House, 2007.
A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
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