August 20, 2019
In conjunction with The Community Library’s Center for Regional History and its “West Where We Are” initiative, please join Pulitzer Prize winner Dr. David Kennedy, Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, for his talk, “How the West Was Won, and What It Has to Lose.”
David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus, at Stanford University. His teaching has included courses in the history of the twentieth-century United States, American political and social thought, American foreign policy, national security strategies, American literature, and the comparative development of democracy in Europe and America.
Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy’s scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history, and for its attention to the concept of the American national character. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women’s history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999) recounts the history of the American people in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and was awarded the Pulitzer and Francis Parkman Prizes in 2000. With Thomas A. Bailey and Lizabeth Cohen, Kennedy is also the co-author of a textbook in American history, The American Pageant, now in its sixteenth edition. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and other publications and media outlets.
