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Other authors named Donald:
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Author's popularity: 5
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Popularity: 1
Vote: | All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | From the time I was a little boy I found myself reading history when I had a choice. I read a lot of things, but history had a special appeal for me. . |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different? |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | In my judgment, the best history is one that tells a story and combines it with analysis. The natural way for an historian to analyze things includes answering with a tale. The combination of telling an interesting story and answering questions along the way that an intelligent person is interested in hearing about--that's history at its peak. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Most civilizations have coped with the problem of death by diminishing it or denying it. Either they say, well, yes, we die, but it's not important because we're not important. The other is to deny mortality, and to say, no, we can be immortal in certain circumstances. . |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction. . |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that's so striking is the whole area of politics. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | You have to liberate yourself first from the prejudices of the world in which you live. |
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Biography
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Donald Kagan (born 1932) is a Yale historian specializing in ancient Greece, notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War.
Born into a Jewish family of Lithuania, his father died soon after, and the remainder of the family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Brooklyn College, then received an MA from Brown University and a PhD from Ohio State University, in 1958.
He converted from a liberal Democrat to a staunch neoconservative in the 1970s. On the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, Kagan and his son, Frederick Kagan, published While America Sleeps, a clarion call to increase defense spending.
Kagan is currently Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale. His course "The Origins of War" has been one of the university's most popular courses for twenty-five years. He lives in Connecticut.
Another son, Robert Kagan, is also active in neoconservative politics and foreign relations.
Books
*The Great Dialogue: A History of Greek Political Thought from Homer to Polybius (1965)
*The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Cornell University Press, 1969) ISBN 0-801-40501-7
*The Archidamian War (1974) ISBN 0-801-40889-X
*The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (1981) ISBN 0-801-41367-2
*The Fall of the Athenian Empire (1987) ISBN 0-801-41935-2
*On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (1995)
*While America Sleeps (2000) (with Frederick Kagan)
*The Western Heritage (2000) (with Steve Ozment and Frank M. Turner)
*The Heritage of World Civilizations (2000) (with Albert M. Craig, William A. Graham, Steve Ozment, and Frank M. Turner)
*The Peloponnesian War (Viking Press, 2003) ISBN 0670032115, a one-volume version of his earlier tetralogy
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Donald Kagan".
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