Donald Kagan (1 May 1932-6 August 2021) was an American historian of Ancient Greece and neoconservative thinker.
Biography[]
Donald Kagan was born in Kursenai, Lithuania in 1932, and he was raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York City, where his family moved after his father's death in 1934. Kagan graduated from Brooklyn College in 1954, Brown University in 1955, and Ohio State University in 1958, and he became a professor of classics and history at Yale University, with his "Origins of War" class being one of Yale's most popular courses for twenty-five years. Originally a liberal Democrat, he became a neoconservative after the armed takeover of Cornell University's Willard Straight Hall by radical Black Power activists; he was greatly impacted by the cowardice of the school administrators. His sons Robert and Frederick Kagan went on to become neoconservative scholars, and Kagan was one of the original signers of the 1997 Statement of Principles by the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century. He died in Washington DC in 2021 at the age of 89.