Kevin Kruse

Guest Author

Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) is a Professor of History at Princeton University. He specializes in the political, social, and urban/suburban history of twentieth-century America, with a particular interest in conflicts over race, rights and religion and the making of modern conservatism.

His first book, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), won prizes including the 2007 Francis B. Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association (for the best first book in Southern history, 2005-2006) and the 2007 Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association. His second book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015), examined the rise of American religious nationalism in the mid-twentieth century and its legacies in American political and religious life. (He discussed the book here with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air.)

Professor Kruse has also written Fault Lines: A History of America Since 1974, a trade/textbook with co-author Julian Zelizer. A sweeping history of the past four decades of American history, the book chronicles the origins of the divided states of America, a nation increasingly riven by stark political partisanship and deep social divisions along lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. Co-written with Julian Zelizer, the book tracks not only the course of our current state of political polarization, but also the ways in which an increasingly fractured media landscape worked to aggravate divisions in American politics and society as well. The book will be published in January 2019.

In addition to these works, Professor Kruse has also served as the co-editor of three collections: The New Suburban History (2006), with Thomas J. Sugrue; Spaces of the Modern City (2008), with Gyan Prakash; and Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (2012) with Stephen Tuck.

Professor Kruse was honored as one of America’s top young “Innovators in the Arts and Sciences” by the Smithsonian Magazine, selected as one of the top young historians in the country by the History News Network, and named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.