David Nasaw


David Nasaw is an American author, biographer and historian who specializes in the cultural, social, and business history of early twentieth-Century America. Nasaw is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the [City University of New York], where he is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History.
In addition to writing numerous scholarly and popular books, he has written for publications such as the Columbia Journalism Review, The American Historical Review, American Heritage, Dissent, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The London Review of Books, and Condé Nast Traveler.
Nasaw has appeared in several documentaries, including a 1996 episode of The American Experience, as well as two episodes of the History Channel 2006 miniseries 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America, "The Homestead Strike", and "The Assassination of President McKinley". He is cited extensively in the U.S. and British media as an expert on the history of popular entertainment and the news media, and as a critic of American philanthropy.

Early life and education

David George Nasaw was born on July 18, 1945 to a Jewish family in Cortland, New York; he was the oldest son of attorney Joshua Nasaw and Beatrice Kaplan, an elementary school teacher.
Nasaw grew up in Roslyn, New York, and, after a year studying in Denmark as an exchange student, was graduated from Roslyn High School in 1963. Nasaw received a bachelor of arts from Bucknell University in 1967, before enrolling in Columbia University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1972 for his dissertation, "Jean-Paul Sartre: Apprenticeship in History ".
While studying at Columbia University, for more than two years from 1970 Nasaw was one of two full-time teachers in the Elizabeth Cleaners Street School, a short-lived experimental alternative free high school founded in New York City. The experience gave rise to the book Starting Your Own High School, written by the students and edited by Nasaw. One of his students at the school was the chess player Peter Winston.

Career

Nasaw's next teaching experience was that of teaching history at the College of Staten Island in 1978. During the 1987–1988 academic year, he was as a Fulbright Professor of American Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Nasaw has been on the doctoral faculty of the City University of New York Graduate Center since 1990, where he also served as chairman. He was director of the Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center as well. He also was the chairman of the advisory board of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the university.
Nasaw is a founder of the Radical History Review.
Although he has published three biographies, Nasaw describes himself as an academic historian, rather than a biographer. A historian, he says, "sweeps away the fables, the myths, the stories" and places scholarly subjects "in time and over time", while for biographers, the organization of the work is laid out in advance. "Writing history is not an art but a craft", Nasaw has said. "It requires interpretation and fifty sources and integrating and assembling this material into a story told by an individual voice."
During an interview of Nasaw regarding his book entitled, The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II, historian Julian Zelizer stated that Nasaw's publication changed forever, how the generation of veterans returning from World War II would be viewed.

Personal life

On June 10, 1978, Nasaw married Dinitia Smith, a novelist, Emmy award-winning filmmaker, and journalist, who worked as a correspondent for The New York Times for twelve years. They are the parents of twin sons, Peter Caleb Nasaw and Daniel Allen Nasaw, born in 1980.
Daniel is a journalist.
Nasaw is the older brother of Jonathan Lewis Nasaw, the prolific author of at more than nine thrillers. His sister, Elizabeth Perl Nasaw, who as "Elizabeth Was" was a poet and publisher of avant-garde magazines, and the cofounder of Xexoxial Editions and Dreamtime Village in West Lima, Wisconsin.

Awards

Books

  • Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in United States
  • Children of the City: At Work and at Play
  • Course of United States History: To 1877, Volume 1, ed.
  • Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements
  • The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
  • Andrew Carnegie
  • The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
  • ''The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II''

Selected articles

  • "Earthly Delights", ', March 23, 1998
  • "The Empire Builders", ', November 24, 2002
  • "Hitler, Stalin, O'Malley and Moses", ', May 25, 2003
  • "A Real Nice Clambécque", ', September 21, 2003
  • "They Wanted to Shape Up America", ', September 27, 2003
  • "Billionaires to the Rescue", ', July 4, 2006
  • "Giving back, big time", Los Angeles Times – November 2, 2006
  • "Looking the Carnegie Gift Horse in the Mouth", ', November 10, 2006
  • "We Can't Rely on the Kindness of Billionaires", ', September 23, 2007
  • "The Rich Threaten Democracy", ', October 14, 2007
  • "A Violent Regeneration", ', May 23, 2009
  • "Banking on the Future", The Wall Street Journal – May 17, 2011

Critical studies and reviews of Nasaw's work

;''The last million''