Professor Keyssar
received his PhD in the History of American Civilization at Harvard and has also
taught at Brandeis University, Duke University,
and MIT. His 1986 book, Out of Work: the
First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts, was awarded several
scholarly prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the
Organization of American Historians; it was also named a Notable Book of the
Year by the New York Times. In 2000,
he published The Right to Vote: the
Contested History of Democracy in the United States, which received the
Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association and was a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize, the LA Times Book Award, and the Francis Parkman Prize. He
is a co-author of Inventing America: A
History of the United States and has written widely on public policy issues
in the popular press.