American historian Donald Kagan, a specialist in classical Greece and the Peloponnesian War, died on August 6 at the age of 89, Yale University announced on Tuesday, where he had been teaching ancient history since 1966. A conspicuous curator and staunch defender of free speech on American campuses, he had also gained recognition in the United States for his popular essays in comparative history, in which he used ancient history as a model and point of reference. contemporary conflicts, such as the Vietnam War or the American engagement in Iraq.
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Born in Lithuania in 1932, Donald Kagan landed in the United States at the age of 2. A graduate in classical history, he specialized very early on in the field of relations between war and politics in the Greek world. His great area of predilection was the story of the fall of Athens to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. A world specialist in this ancient conflict, he devoted to it a monumental
New History of the Peloponnesian War
, published in four volumes from 1969 to 1987. His study of the causes of the conflict had led him to observe that the gear which had ended , in the 5th century BC. AD, the Athenian thalassocracy could have been avoided.
"Despite the vast array of studies on Thucydides and on war that have been published since Kagan's four-volume study, this one remains a gold standard for all historians,"
said Tuesday in a statement from the Yale University historian Joseph Manning.
"This is the largest history book produced in North America in the twentieth century,"
Franco-American critic George Steiner once said of this work.
A committed and conservative historian
Consulted by American political figures for the quality of his essays on the contemporary world, Donald Kagan was a fervent defender of American interventionism. He will be a fervent supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the point of questioning the patriotism of the people who pounded the pavement against them. And his political ideas exploded within the American university landscape. He had notably tried, without success, to inaugurate a special course in
"the study of Western Civilization"
at Yale
. Among his most famous politico-academic analyzes, Donald Kagan had notably compared the American foreign policy carried out in the 1990s with that of the United Kingdom in the years following the end of the First World War.
Decorated by President George W. Bush, the historian also had the ear of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in late 1990. His trial
While America Sleeps
(
"While America sleeps"
), published in 2000 with Cassandra accents, had been commented on a lot in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
“The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated that it is not enough for the state that wishes to maintain peace and the status quo to be a superior power. The crisis occurred, (...) because the most powerful state had a leader who had failed to convince his adversary that he was determined to use this power ”
, he said, for example about the 1962 missile crisis. In Donald Kagan's eyes, his support for American interventionism had only one goal: the preservation of peace and democracy,
" one of the rarest, most delicate and most fragile flowers in this jungle of human experience. "