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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.[…]

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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