Alexander Keyssar

Historian

• Born: May 13, 1947
• Place of Birth: Minnesota

Contribution: Alexander Keyssar is an award-winning historian and professor best known for his work in the field of the social and political history of the United States.

Background

Alexander Keyssar was born May 13, 1947, in Minnesota. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University. He also received his PhD from Harvard, in the history of American civilization.

In 1969, while an undergraduate student, Keyssar won the Le Baron Russell Briggs Prize for honors essays in English for his paper “Melville’s Israel Potter: Reflections on the American Dream.” The paper examines the concept of the American Dream in Herman Melville’s historical novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855).

Keyssar’s doctoral dissertation was titled “Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts.” It examined the history of unemployment in the state and detailed the social repercussions that unemployment has had.

Career

In 1986, Keyssar’s dissertation was revised and later published by Cambridge University Press. It won several scholarly prizes, including the 1987 Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians and the Philip Taft Labor History Prize.

His book The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000) detailed voting-rights history in the United States. Keyssar touches upon many features of voting history, including class, ethnicity, gender, and race. One of the concepts presented in the book is that war was a main factor promoting the expansion of suffrage.

The Right to Vote was highly acclaimed and earned Keyssar several scholarly awards. It was a 2001 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Society of American Historians also made it a finalist for its Francis Parkman Prize for the best book in American history. It won the Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, which also named it best book of the year about US history. A revised and updated edition of the book was published in 2009.

Keyssar contributed to the anthology The Democracy Reader (2002) when editor Sondra Myers included an excerpt from The Right to Vote called “The Project of Democracy.” This excerpt touches on both the notion of democracy as a project and the disputed history of democracy. For the anthology The Unfinished Election of 2000: Leading Scholars Examine America’s Strangest Election (2001), Keyssar contributed the essay “The Right to Vote and Election 2000.” The essay examines both how the right to vote played out in the 2000 US presidential election and complaints from African Americans and Jews about their alleged difficulties voting in Florida. Keyssar also looks at political rhetoric in American culture.

Keyssar coauthored Inventing America: A History of the United States (2003), along with historians Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, and Daniel Kevles. This work uses the theme of innovation and its limits to look at political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions in American history.

In 2004 and 2005, Keyssar chaired the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting, a body assembled by the Social Science Research Council. The commission’s purpose was to apply scholarly research and knowledge to improving the integrity of the voting system in the United States.

Beginning in 2005, Keyssar started contributing articles to the news website the Huffington Post. He covered topics such as the controversy over the US military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, multinational financial corporation Morgan Stanley, and the proposed Employee Free Choice Act of 2009.

Keyssar’s study of American maritime history, called The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600–2000, which he coauthored with historians Alex Roland and W. Jeffrey Bolster, was published in 2008. The book presents a global perspective on the history of shipping in the United States. Oceanic shipping and domestic shipping are both examined along American waters.

In 2019, Harvard University Press published Keyssar's Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?, a timely examination of the controversial institution that stands between American voters and the election of their president, which results in some presidents, such as Donald Trump, losing the popular vote but winning the presidency.

As of the mid-2020s, Keyssar was the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He frequently wrote for various press outlets, including the New York Review of Books and the Boston Globe.

Impact

Keyssar’s contributions to the field of history have provided a deep examination of various political and social aspects of American history. His expertise has made him a leading authority on democracy and voting rights in the United States. His scholarly pursuits have led him to be a part of a voting reform initiative, a notable achievement for a historian.

Personal Life

Keyssar resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.

Bibliography

“Alex Keyssar.” Harvard Kennedy School, 2024, www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/alex-keyssar. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

“Alexander Keyssar on Why We Still Have the Electoral College." Democracy Paradox, from Harvard Kennedy School, 15 May 2024, ash.harvard.edu/articles/democracy-paradox-alexander-keyssar-on-why-we-still-have-the-electoral-college/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

Keyssar, Alexander. “The Strange Career of Voter Suppression.” New York Times, 12 Feb. 2012, archive.nytimes.com/campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/the-strange-career-of-voter-suppression/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.