Lawrence W. Kennedy

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Professor Emeritus of History

Email: lawrence.kennedy@scranton.edu 
Office: St. Thomas Hall 308 E
Phone: 570-941-4294
Fax: 570-941-5843

Lawrence W. Kennedy, Professor Emeritus of History, earned his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. at Boston College. He has taught survey courses in American and Irish history along with electives which focus on urban life, race and immigration.

In 2017 Lawrence Kennedy and his son Patrick co-authored Bricklayer Bill: The Untold Story of the Workingman’s Boston Marathon (University of Massachusetts Press). UMass Press also published his Planning the City upon a Hill: Boston since 1630 in 1992. Planning the City upon a Hill came out in paperback and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1994.

Along with Walter Muir Whitehill, Kennedy co-authored Boston: A Topographical History (Third Enlarged Edition) published by Harvard University Press in 2000.

His current research includes a book, Pounding the Pavement in Port Chester: Running a Hometown Marathon, 1925-1940. This is an account of the lives and dreams of long distance runners and local community boosters in Westchester County, New York during the years of the Great Depression.

Kennedy is also working on a book which explores the career of Irish-American nationalist leader and politician, Patrick A. Collins, in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. This is a joint project begun with Thomas H. O’Connor, late of Boston College.

Kennedy has also published journal articles and book chapters on Boston politics in the nineteenth century and numerous encyclopedia articles and book reviews. He has presented papers at the American Historical Association, the New England Historical Association, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Museum, and the National Famine Museum of Ireland

Before joining the History Department at The University of Scranton in 1992, Kennedy taught at St. Sebastian’s Country Day School (1975-1976), Boston College High School (1976-1985) and at Boston College (as an adjunct faculty member from 1987 to 1992). He was also a consultant in the Policy Development and Research Department of the Boston Redevelopment Authority from 1987 to 1992.  

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