David Michael Kennedy (born July 22, 1941) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University and the Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.
Kennedy is responsible for the recent editions of the popular history textbook The American Pageant. He is also the current editor of the Oxford History of United States series. This position was held previously by C. Vann Woodward. Earlier in his career, Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for World War I, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980). He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999).
Born in Seattle, Kennedy received his A.B. in History from Stanford and MA and PhD from Yale. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
According to the jacket copy of The American Pageant, Kennedy is married and is the father of two sons and a daughter.
- Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970)
- Social Thought in America and Europe, co-editor with Paul A. Robinson (1970)
- Progressivism: The Critical Issues, editor (1971)
- The American People in the Depression (1973)
- The American People in the Age of Kennedy (West Haven: Pendulum Press, 1973)
- The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, co-author with Thomas A. Bailey and Lizabeth Cohen (original 1979), Fourteenth Edition (2010).
- Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980)
- Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 1981
- Power and Responsibility: Case Studies in American Leadership, co-editor with Michael Parrish (1986)
- The American Spirit: United States History as Seen by Contemporaries, co-editor with Thomas A. Bailey (1983)
- Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999)