Kevin Boyle

Kevin Boyle is an American historian of the twentieth-century United States who writes about race, labor, civil rights and political movements. A native of Detroit, he studied at the University of Detroit and earned his doctorate in history at the University of Michigan. He taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at Ohio State University, where he received a distinguished teaching award, before joining Northwestern University as the William Smith Mason Professor of American History.

His first book, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (1995), studied the auto workers' union and postwar politics. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004) tells the story of Ossian Sweet, a Black physician who defended his new home in a white Detroit neighborhood in 1925, and the murder trial that followed. It won the 2004 National Book Award for Nonfiction. His later book The Shattering: America in the 1960s (2021) traces the upheavals of that decade.

Boyle has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Carnegie Corporation.