David Krugler grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He left his home state to attend Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. After graduating with degrees in English and history, he earned a M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He moved back to Wisconsin in 1997 to teach at the University of Wisconsin—Platteville, where he’s now Professor of History. In 2014, he won the university’s Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence. A historian of the modern United States, he has published books on several different topics: Cold War propaganda, nuclear warfare, and racial conflict in the United States. Krugler is the author of The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945-1953 (University of Missouri Press, 2000), This Is Only a Test: How Washington, D.C., Prepared for Nuclear War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is also the editor of the collection The Cold War: Core Documents (Ashbrook Center, 2018). His first novel, The Dead Don’t Bleed (Pegasus Crime), a World War II spy thriller set in Washington, D.C., came out in 2016. The sequel, Rip the Angels from Heaven, was published in 2018. Most recently, he’s been publishing mystery short stories in Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Krugler has served as a faculty leader for teacher education programs at the Newberry Library in Chicago and has made dozens of presentations to academic and public audiences across the country. He is the past recipient of research grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Organization of American Historians, and the White House Historical Association. In Spring 2011, he was a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He has also appeared in historical documentaries, including the National Geographic Channel documentary American Doomsday (2010) and The Elaine Massacre (2019). He has written for The Daily Beast and has been interviewed by the New York Times, CNN, Associated Press, Slate.com, Boston Globe, New York Post, Washington Post, San Francisco Weekly, WBEZ (Chicago), National Geographic, the Karen Hunter Show, BBC Mundo, RealClearPolitics.com, WUSA (Washington, D.C.), Wisconsin Public Radio, and Milwaukee Public Television.