A specialist in U.S. foreign relations, Betty Miller Unterberger is an internationally recognized scholar. Her study of the development of U.S. policy toward Czechoslovakia, quoted below, is now considered a classic. Dr. Unterberger joined the History Department in 1968 at the rank of professor and was the first woman at A&M to hold that rank. She was later named the Patricia and Bookman Peters Professor of History. Before coming to A&M, she earned an M.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Duke University. She is the author of numerous books and articles in scholarly journals. In 1975, she won the Association of Former Students’ Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching, and in 1986–87, she gave the Texas A&M University Faculty Lecture. She was one of nine American experts selected to visit the U.S.S.R. in 1983 in the first meeting of its kind to discuss history and economics. In that year she was also included in “Who’s Who in America” and selected as a “Notable Woman of Texas.” In 1990, she was appointed to the Advisory Committee on Naval History.

In reflecting on life at A&M as one of the only female faculty members, Unterberger stated:

“When I would walk into the classroom on the first day . . . students used to think I was the secretary. . . . When I received a fellowship to study at Duke, the head of the department spent two-and-a-half hours telling me why I had no right to be there, that I was taking bread out of the mouths of deserving male students who were going to get married and have families to support. I wonder where they thought my bread was coming from.”

From 1984 and 1993 interviews with the Battalion.

In her classic study, The United States, Revolutionary Russia, and the Rise of Czechoslovakia (UNC, Chapel Hill, 1989; rpt. 2000, Texas A&M University Press), Unterberger wrote:

“When Soviet troops moved into Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to end the ‘liberalization’ policies of the incumbent Czech government, few persons in either Czechoslovakia or the United States expected the American government to do more than exercise moral pressure to aid the Czechs. Fifty years earlier, however, in the midst of the First World War, when Czech and Slovak peoples opposed the autocracy of the Austro-Hungarian regime at home and the Czecho-Slovak Legion in Russia became involved in a struggle against the Bolsheviks and Austro-German prisoners of war, the American government responded quite differently.”