Michael Kammen

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Michael Kammen is a professor of American cultural history in the Department of History at Cornell University. He was born in 1936 in Rochester, New York, grew up in the Washington, DC area, and was educated at the George Washington University and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1964). He has taught at Cornell since completing his graduate studies at Harvard. He began his career in the 1960s, and won his first renown, as a scholar of the colonial period of American history. But over the last 30 years his scholarship and his teaching interests have broadened to include legal, cultural and social issues of American history of the 19th and 20th centuries as well.

Kammen has been active in organizations advancing the study of history, and served as president of the Organization of American Historians for the 1995-96 year.

Kammen's major works include:

• People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization, which won the Pulitzer Prize (1973)
• Colonial New York: A History. Millwood, NJ: K+O Press, 1975. ISBN 0195107799
• A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (1986), which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Henry Adams Prize. In this work, Kammen argues that the U.S. Constitution is not a machine, but rather an organism. He also asserts that the Constitution should be interpreted liberally, because it was meant to be flexible and adapt to unforeseen circumstances.
• Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991)
• Contested Values: Democracy and Diversity in American Culture (1995)
• American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (1999)
• A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (2004)