Donald Kagan - Biography

Biography

Born into a Jewish family from Kuršėnai, Kagan grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, where his family emigrated when he was two years old, shortly after the death of his father. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1954, received an MA from Brown University in 1955 and a PhD from the Ohio State University in 1958.

Once a liberal Democrat, Professor Kagan changed his views in 1969 and became one of the original signers to the 1997 Statement of Principles by the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century. According to Jim Lobe, cited in The Fall of the House of Bush by Craig Unger (p. 39, n.), Kagan's turn away from liberalism occurred in 1969 when Cornell University was pressured into starting a Black Studies program by gun-wielding militants seizing the Willard Straight Hall: "Watching administrators demonstrate all the courage of Neville Chamberlain had a great impact on me, and I became much more conservative." On the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, Kagan and his son, Frederick Kagan, published While America Sleeps, a call to increase defense spending. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Donald Kagan the National Humanities Medal in 2002, and selected him to deliver the 2005 Jefferson Lecture, which the NEH calls "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." Kagan's Jefferson Lecture was entitled "In Defense of History"; he argued that history is of primary importance in the study of the humanities.

Kagan is currently Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University—a title reserved for only the select few most accomplished academics at Yale. His course "The Origins of War" was one of the university's most popular courses for twenty-five years. He currently teaches "Introduction to Ancient Greek History" and upper level History and Classical Civilization seminars focusing on topics from Thucydides to the Lakedaimonian hegemony. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

He is married to Myrna Kagan, a teacher and historian in her own right, and the author of "Vision in the Sky: New Haven's Early Years, 1638-1784." He is the father of Robert Kagan and Frederick Kagan, both well-known writers. Robert Kagan's wife is Victoria Nuland, spokesperson for the United States Department of State. Frederick Kagan's wife is Kimberly Kagan, a well-known military historian and founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War.