Michael Kazin

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.

He graduated from Dwight-Englewood School in 1966 and received the school's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2006.[2] 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 and briefly a member of the Weatherman faction.[3]

Kazin's research interests are American social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and he has authored books on labor history (Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era); populism (The Populist Persuasion: An American History) and William Jennings Bryan, (A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan).[1]

Kazin wrote an unsympathetic review of Howard Zinn's 1980 book A People's History of the United States, commenting that it was "bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions".[4]

His book War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918 was published by Simon and Schuster on November 1, 2016.

Kazin is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.[5] However, 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."[6]

Kazin married physician Beth C. Horowitz in 1980. They have two children.

• Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 222–224.

• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Interview with Michael Kazin  by Stephen McKiernan, Binghamton University Libraries Center for the Study of the 1960s, February 12, 2011