Kevin M. Kruse | |
|---|---|
 Kruse in 2015 | |
| Born | Kevin Michael Kruse 1972 (age 52–53) Kansas City, Kansas, U.S. |
| Children | 2 |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | White Flight[1] (2000) |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard Polenberg[2] |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | History |
| Sub-discipline | |
| Institutions | Princeton University |
| Website | kevinmkruse |
Kevin Michael Kruse (born 1972) is an American historian and a professor of history atPrinceton University. His research interests include the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America, with a particular focus on the making of modernconservatism.[3][4] Outside of academia, Kruse has attracted substantial attention and following for hisTwitter threads where he provides historical context for and applies historical research to current political events.[3]
Kruse was born inKansas City, Kansas, to aconservative middle-class family; his father was an accountant, and he has three siblings. He moved with his family toNashville,Tennessee, where he attendedMontgomery Bell Academy.[3]
Kruse graduatedPhi Beta Kappa from theUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor's degree in history. While there he was aDJ at the student radio stationWXYC.[5][6] He received his master's and PhD degrees fromCornell University.[3] He wrote his PhD dissertation onwhite flight inAtlanta.[3]
In 2000, Kruse joined the faculty of thePrinceton University Department of History.[7][8] In 2019, Kruse was awarded theGuggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction by theJohn Simon Guggenheim Foundation to support archival research for his next book,The Division: John Doar, the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Movement.[9] In May 2020, Kruse was elected to theSociety of American Historians.[10]
In addition to authoring the books listed below, Kruse has co-edited four books,Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement,Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics and Everyday Life,The New Suburban History, andMyth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.[11][12] He also contributed a chapter toThe 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.[13]
In 2005, Kruse wroteWhite Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, which explores the links between the resistance todesegregation and the rise of modern conservatism.[14][15] The book won the 2007 Francis B. Simkins Award for best first book by an author in the field ofsouthern history from theSouthern Historical Association[16] and the 2007 Malcolm and Muriel Barrow Bell Award for the best book on Georgia History from theGeorgia Historical Society.[17] It was also co-winner of the 2007 Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the Urban Politics Section of theAmerican Political Science Association.[17]
Historian Allison Dorsey wrote inThe American Historical Review that the book is "well-researched, persuasively argued" and "a brilliant analysis of race, class, and politics".[18] Historian Amanda I. Seligman wrote in the journalUrban History (CUP) that the book provides an "important contribution to the scholarship on the political significance of cities and suburbs in the late twentieth-century United States" pointing its greatest strength in "its reading of the subtleties of local and national politics" but criticized "Kruse's identification of Atlanta as the originator ofmodern conservatism" as exaggerated.[19]
In 2015, Kruse wroteOne Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.[20] HistorianD. G. Hart wrote: "America was founded in 1776, but it was only in 1953, with the inauguration ofDwight David Eisenhower as the 34th president, that it became a Christian nation. Such is Kevin M. Kruse's thesis and, after reading “One Nation Under God,” it makes perfect sense."[21] Hart concluded that the book "is an important and convincing reminder that the roots of Christian America were cultivated well before the era of thereligious right. What it fails to do is to supply much evidence of the subtitle's claim that “Corporate America Invented Christian America”".[21]
Historian Axel R. Schäfer reviewing the book inThe American Historical Review, wrote that the book is "intriguing and insightful" but stated that "it revels too much in human-interest stories andad hominem arguments" and that it's "too focused on the idea thatChristianizing the nation was a marketing ploy designed by corporate titans who enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to construct aChristian libertarianism capable of defeating theNew Deal".[22]
Writing forThe New York Times, historianMichael Kazin said: "Kruse tells a big and important story about the mingling of religiosity and politics since the 1930s. Still, he oversells his basic premise. Americans easily accepted placing God's name on their currency and in the oath children recite every school day because similar invocations were already routine in public discourse — from the Declaration's reference to the “unalienable Rights” endowed by the “Creator” to the official chaplains who have opened sessions of the House and Senate with a prayer since 1789."[23]
In 2019, Kruse co-authoredFault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 withJulian E. Zelizer; the book is based on the course that they created together at Princeton University,The United States Since 1974.[24]
Michaelangelo Matos, writing forRolling Stone, praised the book as "a sharp summation of how we moved from post-New Deal liberalism to an increasingly hard-right philosophy", saying that "its deep detail and taut-as-a-thriller pacing make up for the repetition" of its premise that "from the 1970s on, the United States would seem less and less united with each passing decade”.[25] Barton Swaim, writing forThe Wall Street Journal, was more critical, saying: "In “Fault Lines,” conservatives are almost invariably the aggressors in the culture wars and so primarily responsible for the widening gulf between Americans of left and right." He concluded, "Messrs. Kruse and Zelizer miss perhaps the most relevant fault line of our time: the line between disdainful elites who equate reality with their own interpretations and everybody else."[26]
Kruse joinedTwitter in February 2015 at the request of the publisher ofOne Nation Under God.[27] In September 2015, Kruse posted his first Twitter thread in response to a tweet byJoe Scarborough describingBarack Obama as the "most partisan president ever"; in the thread, Kruse argued that Obama's early years in office "showed bipartisan outreach we have not seen in the modern era before".[28][29]
In July 2018, Kruse posted a Twitter thread naming severalDixiecrats who had switched their political affiliations to theRepublican Party in response to a tweeted challenge by right-wing political commentatorDinesh D'Souza to name the Dixiecrats who switched to the Republican Party in protest of theDemocratic Party's embrace of thecivil rights movement.[3][30] Later, D'Souza falsely claimed that in the time ofAbraham Lincoln, the Republican Party supported protecting the rights of legal immigrants; Kruse responded by noting that there was no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants at the time.[3] Kruse gained additional prominence from these tweets,[3][28] with his Twitter following growing to 160,000 over the next three months.[3]
In 2019 Kruse contributed an article toThe 1619 Project titled: "A traffic jam in Atlanta would seem to have nothing to do with slavery. But look closer..." (or "How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam"). The article discussed howJim Crow segregation, the building ofthe highway system in the United States, and opinions on public transit have affected African American communities, particularly in Atlanta and other Southern cities.[31] A slightly modified version was later published as "Traffic" in the 2021 companion volumeThe 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.[32]
In June 2022, Phillip W. Magness (of theAmerican Institute for Economic Research) inReason accused Kruse of plagiarism in his 2000 doctoral dissertation, his 2005 bookWhite Flight, and other works.[33][34][35] InThe Daily Princetonian: "Kruse expressed 'surprise' at the allegations and attributed the lack of citations in one instance to an inadvertent oversight."[34]The Daily Princetonian andThe Chronicle of Higher Education, which discussed the story, both noted past animosity between Magness and Kruse on politically fraught academic matters. A review of the allegations by theChronicle stated that "what Kruse did in those instances is, by almost any definition, plagiarism" and noted that it "is certainly plagiarism under Princeton's guidelines, which specifically say that sloppiness is not an acceptable excuse."[34][35]
In October 2022, Kruse stated on hisTwitter account that both Cornell, where he wrote his dissertation, and Princeton, where he is employed, ultimately determined that these were "citation errors" and did not rise to the level of intentional plagiarism.[36] Magness then posted fresh accusations of plagiarism in other works by Kruse onTwitter.[37][38] According to Kruse's statements on Twitter, Cornell found no intent of plagiarism and took no further action in the matter. Kruse also tweeted a statement from Princeton's Dean of Faculty stating that Kruse's citations could have been formatted better, but that the mistakes were "honest" and "the result of careless cutting and pasting" with "no attempt to conceal an intellectual debt."[37] InThe Atlantic, academic Tyler Austin Harper expressed skepticism of Princeton's conclusion, writing "“careless cutting and pasting” seems to be a pretty good working definition of plagiarism."[39]
Kruse identifies as aliberal, though he has claimed that he is "too amenable to compromise and coalition-building to be an avatar of the far left".[3] Kruse and his wife have two children.[3] He is a fan of theKansas City Chiefs.[40]
{{cite book}}:|website= ignored (help)According to Kevin Kruse's history of the region,White Flight, which explores the links between white backlash against desegregation and the rise of modern conservatism ...
Kruse: Well, that's easy — my Chiefs won the Super Bowl. I waited my whole life for this.
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