Historian Talks About US Place in the Modern World

David Kennedy, Pulitzer-Prize winning American Historian

The Orcas Crossroads Lecture Series continues  Sunday,  May 1, with a presentation by historian David M. Kennedy, “A Tale of Three Cities:  How the United States Won WWII and Made the Modern World.”  The lecture is scheduled for 7:30 pm at Orcas Center.

David M. Kennedy is both the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus, and Co-Director of The Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.  In 2000 Professor Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize in History for his book Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, which recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II.

Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature and economics, Professor Kennedy’s scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political theory

In discussion with Crossroads Chair Bruce Buchanan, Professor Kennedy said, “America’s World War II was different from the war that every other belligerent fought.  Understanding the ways in which strategy and fortune favored the American effort is essential to comprehending not only the war’s outcome, but also the nature of the world we have inhabited ever since – and the obsolescence of America’s twentieth-century war-fighting strategy in the new world of twenty-first century international conflict.”

Professor Kennedy is the winner of numerous honors, awards and fellowships, and the author of ten books, many now available at Orcas Island Public Library and Darvill’s Bookstore.  Tickets are available at the Library, Darvill’s, and online at www.orcascrossroads.org.

The Crossroads Lecture Series is supported by the Crossroads Associate Circle, the Friends of the Orcas Island Library in cooperation with the Orcas Island Public Library, the Daniel and Margaret Carper Foundation and individual contributors.  It is also supported in part by a grant from Humanities Washington, a statewide organization dedicated to providing and supporting cultural education programs in local communities.