Michael Kammen

Michael Kammen Gedaliah ( born October 25, 1936 in Rochester, New York, † November 29, 2013 in Ithaca, New York) was an American historian and professor at Cornell University. He dealt with early American history and American cultural history.

Kammen grew up in the Washington, D.C. and studied at George Washington University and Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1964 with Bernard Bailyn. He then taught at Cornell University, beginning from 1965 as an assistant professor and finally as Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture. In 2008 he became Professor Emeritus. 1980/81 he was a visiting professor of American History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

At first, he dealt with American colonial history, later also generally with American cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries. For his book People of Paradox, in which he went about contradictions in American national character as those between idealism and materialism or Puritanism and hedonism, he received the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for history and for A machine did would go of Itself on the U.S. Constitution in the National culture the Francis Parkman Prize and Henry Adams Prize.

1995/96 he was president of the Organization of American Historians. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2009 he received the Award for Scholarly Distinction from the American Historical Association.

He was married to the historian Carol Kammen and had two sons.

Writings

  • People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization, New York: Alfred Knopf 1972
  • Colonial New York: A History. New York: Scribner, 1975, Oxford University Press 1996
  • A rope of sand; the colonial agents, British politics, and the American Revolution, Cornell University Press 1968
  • A season of youth: the American Revolution and the historical imagination, Oxford University Press 1978
  • Publisher: The Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History, New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
  • A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture, Alfred Knopf 1986
  • Spheres of liberty: changing perceptions of liberty in American culture, University of Wisconsin Press 1986
  • Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, Alfred Knopf 1991
  • Meadows of memory: images of time and tradition in American art and culture, University of Texas Press 1992
  • Contested Values: Democracy and Diversity in American Culture, St. Martin's Press 1995
  • American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, Alfred Knopf 1999
  • Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer, University of North Carolina Press 1999
  • Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture, Vintage Books 2006
  • A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture, University of North Carolina Press 2004
  • Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials, University of Chicago Press 2010
Integrated Authority File
567846
de