Raised in a small town in Ohio, he was educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006 Putnam received the Skytte Prize, the world’s highest accolade for a political scientist, in 2013 President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities, for “deepening our understanding of community in America,” and in 2018 the International Political Science Association awarded him the Karl Deutsch Award for cross-disciplinary research. He has received sixteen honorary degrees from eight countries, including in 2018, the University of Oxford.
Putnam's books include Bowling Alone and, with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.
At The Week magazine. he tagged six books on America's swinging ideology, including:
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (2010).Read about another entry on the list.
This masterful chronicle of the Great Migration tells how millions of black Americans, their hopes dashed after Reconstruction, left the South for what looked like a brighter future in the North. It's an inspiring story of black Americans' persistent faith in the promise of the American "we," and their willingness to stand up and claim their place in it — essentially against all odds.
--Marshal Zeringue
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