Kevin Boyle
Kevin Boyle teaches history at Northwestern University. His work focuses on race, class, and politics in the twentieth-century United States. He is the author of The Shattering: America in the 1960s; Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age ; and The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968. He is coauthor (with Victoria Getis) of Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, 1900–1930 . Arc of Justice received the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
FEATURED LECTURE
The Shattering: America in the 1960s
OAH Lectures by Kevin Boyle
Drawing on his recent book, Kevin Boyle traces a new history of the 1960s through four women whose lives were shaped by the decade's upheavals. It's a story of sweeping change -- of the struggle for racial justice, the reconstruction of individual rights, and the terrible weight of war -- told in an intimate way.
On September 8, 1925 Ossian and Gladys Sweet moved into their first home on an ordinary side street in Detroit. This lecture -- based on Kevin Boyle's prize-winning book -- turns that ordinary event into a story of one of the era's most important civil rights struggles.
Political violence runs through the American experience. In this lecture Kevin Boyle explore two horrific events in modern American history, one from the 1910s, the other from the 1930s. They have no connection whatsoever. Yet once they’re put together they reveal a central dynamic of the brutal violence that has long plagued our nation.