challenges to democracy

David M. Oshinsky (born 1944) is an American historian. He is the director of the Division of Medical Humanities at NYU School of Medicine and a professor in the Department of History at New York University.

Oshinsky graduated from Cornell in 1965 and obtained his PhD from Brandeis University in 1971. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize in History for his 2005 book, Polio: An American Story. Oshinsky’s most recent book, Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, was published in 2016. His other books include the D.B. Hardeman Prize-winning A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, and the Robert Kennedy Prize-winning Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. His articles and reviews appear regularly in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He previously held the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin.