David Michael Kennedy is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University[1] and the Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.
Kennedy is responsible for the recent editions of the popular history textbook The American Pageant. He is also the current editor of the Oxford History of United States series. This position was held previously by C. Vann Woodward. Earlier in his career, Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for World War I, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980). He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999).
This was the required reading for my AP US history class. It was one of the best written textbooks I’ve been assigned, my teacher even allowed me to keep a copy. For a textbook, it was enjoyable. The author has a sense of humor. That being said, it was no beach read. If you’re self studying for the APUSH exam, I highly recommend this book. The sections covering the second half of the 20th century are a little bit ideologically driven, but that’s hard to avoid with recent events. Definitely a good foundational text for learning American History.