David Kennedy on the Columbia and Snake Rivers

David M. Kennedy, '63, a member of the Stanford faculty since 1967, is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus, and founding director of The Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford. Over the course of his academic career, he has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in American foreign policy, the comparative development of democracy in Europe and the U.S., the history of 20th-century United States, American political and social thought, American literature, and the evolution of the American West. His scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analyses with social and political history, an outcome of his interdisciplinary training in American studies, which combined history, literature, and economics.

Professor Kennedy has lectured on American history around the globe and contributed his expertise to a broad swath of national media, from The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times to the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and productions aired on C-Span and NPR. He has also served on the advisory board for the PBS series, The American Experience, and authored some 10 books, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom from Fear and his best-selling high school textbook, The American Pageant.

On this trip he plans to talk about both the natural and human history of the Columbia Basin, from the cataclysmic “Missoula Floods” some 15 millennia ago, to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Whitman Massacre and “Oregon Fever” in the 1840s, and the enormous changes that overtook the Basin in the 20th century, including the Depression-era creation of the Bonneville Power Authority and the atomic bomb project at Hanford, Washington, during WWII.