唐纳德·卡根

唐纳德·卡根（英语：Donald Kagan, /ˈkeɪɡən/, 1932年5月1日—2021年8月6日）是一位美国历史学家，专攻古希腊史，尤其是伯罗奔尼撒战争史。

生平

1932年出生于立陶宛库尔舍奈，1934年随父母移民到美国，在纽约布鲁克林长大，1954年毕业于布鲁克林学院，1955年毕业于布朗大学，1958年毕业于俄亥俄州立大学。后进入康奈尔大学和耶鲁大学任教。

家庭和个人生活

唐纳德·卡根居住在康涅狄格州纽黑文，其妻子默娜·卡根（Myrna Kagan，1932-2017）是一个历史教师，长子为作家罗伯特·卡根，长媳是外交官卢岚（舍温·B·努兰之女），次子弗雷德里克·卡根，次媳金伯莉·卡根。

2021年8月6日，卡根于华盛顿哥伦比亚特区一间老人院逝世，终年89岁。

著作

《伯罗奔尼撒战争的爆发》（The Outbreak of The Peloponnesian War，1969年，ISBN 0-8014-0501-7），中译版华东师范大学出版社，曾德华译，2014年6月，ISBN 9787561796672

《论战争之源起与和平之存续》（On the origins of war and the preservation of peace，Doubleday，1995年，ISBN 0385423748）

《西方的遗产》（The Western Heritage，与史蒂文·奥兹门特、弗兰克·M·特纳合著，New York: Prentice Hall，2003年，ISBN 0-13-182839-8），中译版上海人民出版社，袁永明 等译，2009年6月，ISBN 9787208078925

《伯罗奔尼撒战争》（The Peloponnesian War，2003年，ISBN 0-670-03211-5），中译版社会科学文献出版社，陆大鹏译，2016年4月，ISBN 9787509777541

Donald Kagan (May 1, 1932 – August 6, 2021) was a Lithuanian-born American historian and classicist at Yale University specializing in ancient Greece. He formerly taught in the Department of History at Cornell University. Kagan was considered among the foremost American scholars of Greek history and is notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War.

Early life and education

Kagan was born in Kuršėnai, Lithuania, on May 1, 1932, to a Jewish family. His father, Shmuel, died before Kagan turned two years old, and his mother, Leah (Benjamin), subsequently emigrated to the United States with Kagan and his sister. He grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He attended Thomas Jefferson High School, where he played football, before becoming the first person in his family to go to college.

As a child, he developed an interest in European history, his initial goal was to become a high school teacher. At Brooklyn College, he was inspired by Meta Elizabeth Schutz to specialize in ancient history.

He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1954, received a master's degree in classics from Brown University in 1955, and completed a Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University in 1958 with a dissertation titled Politics and Policy in Corinth.

Academic career

Donald Kagan started to teach at Capital University during the last year of his doctorate. He then briefly taught at Pennsylvania State University, and then Cornell University from 1960 to 1969, where he received two teaching awards.

He started working at Yale University in 1969 and he remained there for the next 44 years until his retirement in 2013.

At Yale he held a series of endowed professorships of increasing seniority: the Colgate Professor of History and Classics (1979), the Bass Professor of History, Classics, and Western Civilization (1991), the Hillhouse Professor of History and Classics (1995), and finally the Sterling Professor of Classics and History, Yale's highest faculty honor, from 2002 until his retirement.

He also held several administrative posts at Yale: he served twice as chairman of the Department of Classics. Additionally, he was Master of Timothy Dwight College from 1976 to 1978, Acting Director of Athletics from 1987 to 1988, and Dean of Yale College from 1989 to 1992.

His course Historical Studies in the Origins of War, launched shortly after he joined Yale's faculty, drew hundreds of students each fall for decades and formed the basis of a book he published in 1995 called On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. He also taught Introduction to Ancient Greek History, recorded for Open Yale Courses in 2007, as well as upper level History and Classical Civilization seminars ranging on topics from Thucydides to the Lacedaemonian hegemony.

Scholarship

The Peloponnesian War

Kagan wrote a comprehensive narrative history about the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) consisting of four volumes, published by Cornell University Press between 1969 and 1987. The series approaches the war primarily as political and military history rather than social or economic history, with each volume challenging a specific aspect of Thucydides's account.

Volume 1: The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (1969) covers the first Peloponnesian war and the Thirty Years' Peace.

Kagan organized the volume around a single question: Was the war inevitable, or could it have been avoided?

Rather than accepting Thucydides's own view that the growth of Athenian power made conflict with Sparta unavoidable, Kagan examined the war's individual decision points one by one, asking at each whether a different choice had been possible.

He concluded that the war was not inevitable: there were multiple points at which it could have been averted, and responsibility for its outbreak lay with the specific decisions made by Corinthian, Spartan and Athenian leaders at those moments, not with impersonal historical forces.

Volume 2: The Archidamian War (1974) covers the period of conflict from 432 to 421, known as the Archidamian War.