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:
Drift and Mastery by Walter Lippmann (1914).Read about the other entries on the list.
At a critical historical moment when the nation was drifting down an ever-darkening path, the 25-year-old Lippmann called on citizens to repudiate fatalism and embrace their role as agents of change. His book reads like a voice from the past exhorting today's youth to master the future of our democracy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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