Donald Kagan (born 1932) is a Yale historian specializing in ancient Greece, notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War.

Born into a Jewish family of Lithuania, his father died soon after, and the remainder of the family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Brooklyn College, then received an MA from Brown University and a PhD from Ohio State University, in 1958.

He converted from a liberal Democrat to a staunch neoconservative in the 1970s. On the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, Kagan and his son, Frederick Kagan, published While America Sleeps, a clarion call to increase defense spending.

Kagan is currently Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale. His course "The Origins of War" has been one of the university's most popular courses for twenty-five years. He lives in Connecticut.

Another son, Robert Kagan, is also active in neoconservative politics and foreign relations.

Books

• The Great Dialogue: A History of Greek Political Thought from Homer to Polybius (1965)
• The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Cornell University Press, 1969) ISBN 0-801-40501-7
• The Archidamian War (1974) ISBN 0-801-40889-X
• The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (1981) ISBN 0-801-41367-2
• The Fall of the Athenian Empire (1987) ISBN 0-801-41935-2
• On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (1995)
• While America Sleeps (2000) (with Frederick Kagan)
• The Western Heritage (2000) (with Steve Ozment and Frank M. Turner)
• The Heritage of World Civilizations (2000) (with Albert M. Craig, William A. Graham, Steve Ozment, and Frank M. Turner)
• The Peloponnesian War (Viking Press, 2003) ISBN 0670032115, a one-volume version of his earlier tetralogy

External link

• Kagan Classics faculty page at Yale (http://www.yale.edu/classics/facultystaff/kagan_d.html)
• Kagan History faculty page at Yale (http://www.yale.edu/history/faculty/kagan.html)