Donald Kagan, Leading Historian of Ancient Greece, Died at the age of 89

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Mrs. Kagan, who taught elementary and wrote two books about the history of New Haven, Conn., Died in 2017. Along with her sons, Professor Kagan is survived by two grandchildren.

Professor Kagans On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (1994), who argued that leaders need to show not only power but also courage in the face of challengers, is to be influenced by alien hawks who policy.

He attended Brooklyn College and later received a masters degree in history from Brown University and, in 1958, a doctorate from Ohio State University. He taught briefly at Pennsylvania State University and traveled to Greece with a Fulbright, his wife and newborn son Robert to pull, before settling at Cornell University.

Professor Kagan fell in love with Cornell, especially being helpful by its teachers. But in 1969, when an armed Black student took over an administration building, it demanded the creation of a center of African studies and amnesty for fellow students who had been disciplined for an earlier protest. , the decision of the universities to negotiate with them struck him as a fixture in violence. Months later he was cleared for Yale. The crisis at Cornell was, he later said, the worst experience of his life.

Although he initially admired Kingman Brewster, the president of Yales, for his stance against campus radicalism, in 1974 Professor Kagan criticized him after the university canceled the speech of William Sho Gordon, a Stanford physicist and Nobel laureate. Prize believes that Blacks are less genetic. . Professor Kagan strongly disagrees with Shockley’s views, but he believes the university should expose students to challenging views.

In response to that criticism, Mr. Brewster asked historian C. Vann Woodward to write a report on the discourse on campus, and later adopted many of the proposals that lined up with Professor Kagans ’views.

Professor Kagans ’passion for ancient Greece communicates another of his great passions: sports. He would say that a root of his controversial nature is that as a youngster in 1930s Brooklyn, he was a Yankees fan in a sea of ​​Dodgers caps. Among his greatest moments, he said, was the year Yale asked him to serve as acting director of athletics, a job he enjoyed even as he continued to teach history.

He sees baseball as a Homeric allegory, one in which a hero washes batter from the house and must overcome unexpected challenges to get back. That view set up one of his most famous articles: a withering review in The Public Interest by columnist George Wills’s book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (1990).

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