Michael Kazin | |
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Born | New York City, New York, U.S. | June 6, 1948
Education | Harvard University (BA) Portland State University (MA) Stanford University (PhD) |
Relatives | Alfred Kazin (father) |
Michael Kazin (born June 6, 1948) is an American historian and professor at Georgetown University. He is co-editor of Dissent magazine. [1] [2] [3]
Kazin was born in New York City in 1948 and was raised in Englewood, New Jersey. He is the son of literary critic Alfred Kazin, and step-son of structural engineer Mario Salvadori.
He graduated from Dwight-Englewood School in 1966 and received the school's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2006. He received a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard, an M.A. in History from Portland State University, and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford. As a Harvard student he was a leader in Students for a Democratic Society.
Kazin's main research interests are American social movements and politics of the 19th and 20th centuries. He has authored books on labor history ( Barons of Labor ); populism ( The Populist Persuasion ) and a biography of William Jennings Bryan, ( A Godly Hero ). He is also co-author (with Maurice Isserman) of America Divided , now in its sixth edition; American Dreamers and War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918 . Barons of Labor was awarded the Herbert Gutman Prize in 1988, and War Against War won the award for the best book in peace history published in 2017 and 2018 from the Peace History Society.
Kazin has written numerous reviews and articles for such periodicals as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books , The New Republic, and The Nation.
He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Kazin has been a Fulbright scholar in the Netherlands and Japan. He has twice been a member of the Pulitzer Prize jury for biography and autobiography. In 2020, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kazin is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. In an article for the Fall 2019 issue of Dissent magazine, Kazin argues that strategic collaboration between liberals and leftists is essential for the realization of a progressive political program. He wrote that "no Democrat will win the presidency in 2020 unless she or he can mobilize a broad coalition in which socialists would still be a distinct minority. In the United States, a strategic alliance between liberals and leftists is the only way durable changes have ever been won ... Abolitionists who joined the Republican Party drove Radical Reconstruction; union activists with socialist convictions helped make the Democrats a semblance of a labor party in big industrial states; the black freedom movement worked with white liberals to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Such coalitions were short-lived and frustrated radicals who wanted more far-reaching results. But when liberals and leftists remained at odds, as during the final decades of the past century, they made it easier for the right to triumph."
Kazin married physician Beth C. Horowitz in 1980. They have two children, Danny, born in 1988, and Maia, born in 1991.
William Jennings Bryan was an American lawyer, orator, and politician. Beginning in 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the Democratic Party, running three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States in the 1896, 1900, and 1908 elections. He served in the House of Representatives from 1891 to 1895 and as the Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1915. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, Bryan was often called "the Great Commoner", and because of his rhetorical power and early fame as the youngest presidential candidate, "the Boy Orator".
The New Deal coalition was an American political coalition that supported the Democratic Party beginning in 1932. The coalition is named after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, and the follow-up Democratic presidents. It was composed of voting blocs who supported them. The coalition included labor unions, blue-collar workers, big city machines, racial and religious minorities, white Southerners, and intellectuals. Besides voters the coalition included powerful interest groups: Democratic Party organizations in most states, city machines, labor unions, some third parties, universities, and foundations. It was largely opposed by the Republican Party, the business community, and rich Protestants. In creating his coalition, Roosevelt was at first eager to include liberal Republicans and some radical third parties, even if it meant downplaying the "Democratic" name. By the 1940s, the Republican and third-party allies had mostly been defeated. In 1948, the Democratic Party stood alone and survived the splits that created two splinter parties.
The People's Party, also known as the Populist Party or simply the Populists, was an agrarian populist political party in the United States in the late 19th century. The Populist Party emerged in the early 1890s as an important force in the Southern and Western United States, but collapsed after it nominated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 United States presidential election. A rump faction of the party continued to operate into the first decade of the 20th century, but never matched the popularity of the party in the early 1890s.
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James Francis Aloysius McIntyre was an American prelate of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Los Angeles from 1948 to 1970, and was created a cardinal in 1953. He was a highly successful builder of new parishes, churches, and schools. He was notable in Church politics, and his reputation remains highly controversial.
Michael Laban Walzer is an American political theorist and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of the left-wing magazine Dissent, which he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University, an advisory editor of the Jewish journal Fathom, and sits on the editorial board of the Jewish Review of Books.
Dissent is an American Left intellectual magazine founded in 1954. It is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas and is currently edited by Natasha Lewis and Timothy Shenk. Former co-editors include Irving Howe, Mitchell Cohen, Michael Walzer, and David Marcus.
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Ellen Wolf Schrecker is an American professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University. She has received the Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship at the Tamiment Library at NYU. She is known primarily for her work in the history of McCarthyism. Historian Ronald Radosh has described her as "the dean of the anti-anti-Communist historians."
Joshua Michael Zeitz is an American historian and former Democratic politician. He is the author of several books on American political and social history and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Dissent, and American Heritage. Zeitz appeared as a commentator on two PBS documentaries – Boomer Century, and Ken Burns' Prohibition — and has commented on public policy matters on CNBC and CNN International. He has held faculty positions at Harvard, Cambridge and Princeton and is the author of four books.
Maurice Isserman, formerly William R. Kenan and the James L. Ferguson chairs, is a Professor of History at Hamilton College. He has written about the Communist Party USA during the Popular Front period of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the emergence of the New Left and the 1960s. He co-authored a biography with Dorothy Ray Healey and authored a biography of Michael Harrington, both of whom were co-founders of Democratic Socialists of America. He has contributed editorials and book reviews to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The American Alpine Review. In 2008, he began writing about mountaineering.
Tom David Kahn was an American social democrat known for his leadership in several organizations. He was an activist and influential strategist in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a senior adviser and leader in the U.S. labor movement.
This timeline of modern American conservatism lists important events, developments and occurrences that have affected conservatism in the United States. With the decline of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party after 1960, the movement is most closely associated with the Republican Party (GOP). Economic conservatives favor less government regulation, lower taxes and weaker labor unions while social conservatives focus on moral issues and neoconservatives focus on democracy worldwide. Conservatives generally distrust the United Nations and Europe and apart from the libertarian wing favor a strong military and give enthusiastic support to Israel.
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Edward Michael Harrington Jr. was an American democratic socialist. As a writer, he was best known as the author of The Other America. Harrington was also a political activist, theorist, professor of political science, and radio commentator. He was a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and its most influential early leader.
The Jewish left consists of Jews who identify with, or support, left-wing or left-liberal causes, consciously as Jews, either as individuals or through organizations. There is no one organization or movement which constitutes the Jewish left, however. Jews have been major forces in the history of the labor movement, the settlement house movement, the women's rights movement, anti-racist and anti-colonialist work, and anti-fascist and anti-capitalist organizations of many forms in Europe, the United States, Australia, Algeria, Iraq, Ethiopia, South Africa, and modern-day Israel. Jews have a history of involvement in anarchism, socialism, Marxism, and Western liberalism. Although the expression "on the left" covers a range of politics, many well-known figures "on the left" have been of Jews who were born into Jewish families and have various degrees of connection to Jewish communities, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, or the Jewish religion in its many variants.
The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer lifestyles on a broad range of social issues such as feminism, gay rights, drug policy reforms, and gender relations. The New Left differs from the traditional left in that it tended to acknowledge the struggle for various forms of social justice, whereas previous movements prioritized explicitly economic goals. However, many have used the term "New Left" to describe an evolution, continuation, and revitalization of traditional leftist goals.
Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era is a history of San Francisco during the Progressive era, focusing on the relationship between labor and management in the construction industry. It was written by Michael Kazin and published by University of Illinois Press in 1987 ; it is part of the Working Class in American History series.