Alexander Keyssar (born May 13, 1947)^[1] is an American historian and the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.^[2]

Life

Alex graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English Literature from Harvard College in 1969. In 1977 he graduated from Harvard University with a PhD in the History of American Civilization. He taught at Brandeis University, Duke University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[3]

Awards

• 1987 Frederick Jackson Turner Award; Philip Taft Labor History Prize for Out of Work
• 2001 Beveridge Prize for The Right to Vote; Eugene Genovese Prize for The Right to Vote
• 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
• 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist for The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
• 2001 Parkman Prize, Finalist
• 2005 Fulbright Specialists University of Lisbon^[4]

Works

• Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?. Harvard University Press. 2020. ISBN 978-0-674-66015-1.
• The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. Basic Books. 2001. ISBN 978-0-465-02969-3. Alexander Keyssar. (2000) revised 2009
• Inventing America: A History of the United States. W.W. Norton. 2003. ISBN 978-0-393-97435-5.
• Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts. Cambridge University Press. 1986. ISBN 978-0-521-29767-7. Alexander Keyssar.
• Melville's Israel Potter: reflections on the American dream. Harvard University Press. 1969. ISBN 978-0-674-56475-6. Alexander Keyssar.
• "The Electoral College Flunks", The New York Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 5 · March 24, 2005
• Keyssar, Alexander (October 17, 2004). "Peculiar institution". The Boston Globe.

Anthologies

• Sondra Myers, ed. (2002). "The Project of Democracy". The democracy reader. IDEA. ISBN 978-0-9702130-3-7.
• Jack N. Rakove, ed. (2002). "The Right to Vote and Election 2000". The Unfinished Election Of 2000: Leading Scholars Examine America's Strangest Election. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-06838-8.

Co-author

• Alex Roland; W. Jeffrey Bolster; Alexander Keyssar (2008). The Way of the Ship: America's Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600-2000. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-13600-3.
• Inventing America, a text integrating the history of technology and science into the mainstream of American history
• Comparative and International Working-Class History. In 2004/5