David Nasaw | |
---|---|
Born | David George Nasaw July 18, 1945 Cortland, New York, U.S. [1] |
Education | Bucknell University (B.A) Columbia University (Ph.D) |
Occupation | Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History |
Employer | CUNY Graduate Center |
Known for | Historian, author |
Spouse | |
Children | 2 |
David Nasaw (born July 18, 1945) is an American author, biographer and historian who specializes in the cultural, social and business history of early 20th Century America. [2] Nasaw is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History. [3]
In addition to writing numerous scholarly and popular books, he has written for publications such as the Columbia Journalism Review , American Historical Review, American Heritage, Dissent , The New Yorker , The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , Slate , The London Review of Books , and Condé Nast Traveler .
Nasaw has appeared in several documentaries, including The American Experience, 1996, and two episodes of the History Channel's April 2006 miniseries 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America : "The Homestead Strike" and "The Assassination of President McKinley". [1] He is cited extensively in the US and British media as an expert on the history of popular entertainment and the news media, and as a critic of American philanthropy.
David George Nasaw was born on July 18, 1945, in Cortland, New York, the oldest son of lawyer Joshua Nasaw (1909–1970) and Beatrice Kaplan (1917–2010), an elementary school teacher. [4] Nasaw is the older brother of Jonathan Lewis Nasaw (b. August 26, 1947), [5] the prolific author of at least nine thrillers; [6] [7] [8] and Elizabeth Perl Nasaw (May 29, 1956 – February 28, 2004), [9] who as "Elizabeth Was" (later "Liz Was" and finally "Lyx Ish") was a poet and publisher of avant-garde magazines, [4] [10] and the cofounder of Xexoxial Editions and Dreamtime Village in West Lima, Wisconsin. [11] [12]
Nasaw grew up in Roslyn, New York, and, after a year studying in Denmark as an exchange student, [13] graduated from Roslyn High School in 1963. [14] Nasaw graduated from Bucknell University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1967, before enrolling in Columbia University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1972 [1] for his dissertation "Jean-Paul Sartre: Apprenticeship in History (1925–45)". [15] [16]
While studying at Columbia University, for more than two years from 1970 Nasaw was one of two full-time teachers in the Elizabeth Cleaners Street School, [17] [18] a short-lived experimental alternative free high school founded in New York City. The experience gave rise to the book "Starting Your Own High School," written by the students and edited by Nasaw. [19]
Nasaw began teaching history at the College of Staten Island in 1978. [20] During the 1987–1988 academic year, he was as a Fulbright Professor of American Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. [21] [22] Nasaw has been on the doctoral faculty of the City University of New York's Graduate Center since 1990, [20] where he also served as chairman. He was director of the CUNY Graduate Center's Center for the Humanities, and the chairman of the advisory board of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the university. [23] [24]
Nasaw is a founder of the Radical History Review .
Since June 10, 1978, Nasaw has been married to Dinitia Smith, [25] [26] a novelist, Emmy award-winning filmmaker, [27] and journalist, who worked as a correspondent for The New York Times for 12 years. [28] [29] They are the parents of twin sons: Peter Caleb Nasaw and journalist Daniel Allen Nasaw, born in 1980. [1] [30]
Although he has published three biographies, Nasaw describes himself as an academic historian, rather than a biographer. [31] A historian, he says, "sweeps away the fables, the myths, the stories" and places scholarly subjects "in time and over time", while for biographers, the organization of the work is laid out in advance. "Writing history is not an art but a craft," Nasaw has said. [32] "It requires interpretation and fifty sources and integrating and assembling this material into a story told by an individual voice."
In this Nasaw's highly cited history, Nasaw "unearthed the long-forgotten story of the Newsboy Strike." [37] The book inspired the Disney film Newsies and the subsequent Broadway musical. [38]
Going Out "unearths fascinating details about everything from the early history of the movies to pre-World War I dance crazes," wrote critic Jackson Lears in the New York Times. [39] Nasaw "raises fundamental questions about the web of connections joining commercial play, public space and cultural cohesion," he wrote.
Nasaw's 2000 biography of the American newspaper baron was praised as "an absorbing and ingeniously organized biography... of the most powerful publisher America has ever known", [40] and for "immediacy that almost makes the reader forget that the author himself was not there as the story unfolded". [41] In 2001, The Chief won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Bancroft Prize for American history. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Nasaw's 2006 biography of the American steel mogul, was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography. [33] A reviewer praised Nasaw for "bringing to life the fascinating world of business moguls, statesmen, journalists and intellectuals in which Carnegie moved." [42] Praising Nasaw's "keen all-rounder's eye", Christopher Hitchens wrote: "The great strength of this immense biography is the way in which David Nasaw causes these tributaries — capitalism, radicalism, and educational aspiration — to converge like the three rivers (the Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Monongahela) whose confluence makes the site of Pittsburgh possible." [43] The book was among The New York Times' 100 Notable Books of the Year, and among the Favorite Books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times, which praised it as "a fresh and thorough assessment."
Following the success of Nasaw's 2000 biography of William Randolph Hearst, Senator Ted Kennedy approached Nasaw to write a biography of his father, Kennedy patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. Nasaw told the family that as an academic historian, he had no interest in writing an "authorized biography". [44] "I told him I would undertake this project if I had guarantees to see all the documents at the Kennedy Library and elsewhere, and if I were free to write whatever I wanted, with no censorship or interference of any kind," Nasaw said. Senator Kennedy said he had read and admired Nasaw's book on Hearst and believed the historian would make a "fair evaluation of his life and contributions." The Kennedy family agreed to sit for interviews and to make Joseph Kennedy's private papers available. After publication, the book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2013.
The Pulitzer Prizes are two dozen annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters." They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
William Randolph Hearst Sr. was an American newspaper publisher and politician who developed the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism in violation of ethics and standards influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human-interest stories. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his wealthy father, Senator George Hearst.
In journalism, yellow journalism and the yellow press are American newspapers that use eye-catching headlines and sensationalized exaggerations for increased sales. The English term is chiefly used in the US. In the United Kingdom, a similar term is tabloid journalism. Other languages, e.g. Russian, sometimes have terms derived from the American term. Yellow journalism emerged in the intense battle for readers by two newspapers in New York City in 1890s. It was not common in other cities.
Joseph Allan Nevins was an American historian and journalist, known for his extensive work on the history of the Civil War and his biographies of such figures as Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller, as well as his public service. He was a leading exponent of business history and oral history.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Ronald Chernow is an American writer, journalist, and biographer. He has written bestselling historical non-fiction biographies.
Arthur Bernard Krock was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist. He became known as the "Dean of Washington newsmen" in a career that spanned the tenure of 11 United States presidents.
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic, and executive.
Peter Balakian is an American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller. Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.
Stacy Madeleine Schiff is an American former editor, essayist, and author of five biographies. Her biography of Véra Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic.
David Margolick is an American journalist. He is long-time contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Margolick has held similar positions at Newsweek and Portfolio.com. Prior to joining Vanity Fair he was a legal affairs reporter at The New York Times, where he wrote the weekly “At the Bar" column and covered the trials of O.J. Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt, and William Kennedy Smith. In his fifteen years at the Times, the paper entered his work four times for the Pulitzer Prize. He remains a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. His work has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, Tablet, and The Forward.
John Adams is a 2001 biography of the Founding Father and second U.S. President John Adams, written by the popular American historian David McCullough, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. It was adapted into the 2008 television miniseries of the same name by HBO Films. Since the TV miniseries debuted, an alternative cover has been added to the book showing Paul Giamatti as John Adams. The book is available as both hardcover and paperback.
Timothy P. Egan is an American author, journalist and former op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Egan has written nine books. Egan, a third-generation Westerner, lives in Seattle.
Eric Nalder is an American investigative journalist based in Seattle, Washington. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes.
Shareen Blair Brysac is an author of non-fiction books and a former dancer, television producer/director/writer.
Fredrik Logevall is a Swedish-American historian and educator at Harvard University, where he is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is a specialist in U.S. politics and foreign policy. Logevall was previously the Stephen and Madeline Anbinder Professor of History at Cornell University, where he also served as vice provost and as director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. He won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam. His most recent book, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (2020), won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Joel Graham Brinkley was an American syndicated columnist. He taught in the journalism program at Stanford University from 2006 until 2013, after a 23-year career with The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1980 and was twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.
Dinitia Smith is an American author and filmmaker.