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David Kennedy
David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachian Professor of History at Stanford University. His scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis with social history and political history.[…]
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Recalling the Sputnik propaganda.

David Kennedy: I was pretty . . . Now you have to remember this is in the 1950s by the time I was coming to consciousness about the fact that I had to go on in life and actually make a living. There was lots of propaganda at that time about science and engineering education. Sputnik in 1957 was, of course, a notable point in all that. And I graduated high school in 1959, so I was in an environment that was saturated with that kind of message. And I thought, along with a lot of other young people of my generation, that I would become an engineer. And the reason I went to Stanford as an undergraduate, in fact, was to study electrical engineering. That’s not the way I ended up, but that was my original intention. Recorded on: 7/4/07

 

 

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