Kevin Kruse

Kevin M. Kruse

Kevin Michael Kruse, born in 1972, is an American historian and professor of history at Princeton University. His work belongs to the study of twentieth-century America, especially the political, social, and urban and suburban forces that shaped modern life. He is especially associated with the history of modern conservatism, a subject he has approached through race, religion, cities, suburbs, and national politics.

Kruse was born in Kansas City, Kansas, into a conservative middle-class family. His father was an accountant, and he grew up with three siblings. His family later moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended Montgomery Bell Academy. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor’s degree in history, and while there he was a DJ at the student radio station WXYC. He went on to earn his master’s degree and PhD from Cornell University, writing his doctoral dissertation on white flight in Atlanta.

In 2000, Kruse joined the faculty of Princeton University’s Department of History. His first major book, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, appeared in 2005. It explored links between resistance to desegregation and the rise of modern conservatism. The book won the 2007 Francis B. Simkins Award for best first book in southern history, the 2007 Malcolm and Muriel Barrow Bell Award for the best book on Georgia history, and was co-winner of the 2007 Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

Kruse continued to write about the ways public belief and political power are formed. His 2015 book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, examined the mingling of religiosity and politics since the 1930s. In 2019, he co-authored Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 with Julian E. Zelizer, based on the Princeton course they created together, The United States Since 1974. He has also co-edited several books, including Fog of War, Spaces of the Modern City, The New Suburban History, and Myth America, and contributed a chapter to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

Outside the classroom and the archive, Kruse became widely noticed in the mid-2010s for Twitter threads that used historical research to give context to current political events. He joined Twitter in February 2015 at the request of the publisher of One Nation Under God, and that same year posted a thread responding to a claim about Barack Obama’s partisanship. In 2018, he drew attention for a thread naming Dixiecrats who had switched to the Republican Party. In 2019, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction to support archival research for The Division: John Doar, the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Movement, and in 2020 he was elected to the Society of American Historians.

Kruse’s words resonate because he brings the past into public view with directness and care. His work asks readers to see how modern arguments grew from older conflicts over race, religion, party, and place. A line featured with his quotations, “Life is about making an impact, not making an income,” fits the public spirit of a scholar who has used research not only for books and classrooms, but also for wider civic conversation.