Michael S. Kideckel

Historian and Educator

I teach, research, and produce public history about nature, food, and capitalism, with an emphasis on branding and on women's history. I received a PhD in history from Columbia University in 2018. My book project, Fresh from the Factory: Breakfast Cereal, Natural Food, and the Business of Reform, 1890-1920, is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. It uses the breakfast cereal industry’s advocacy of “natural food” to explain the industrial roots of American ideas about nature. The work is based on my dissertation, which received the 2019 Bancroft Dissertation Award. 

I teach at Princeton Day School, where I have run courses on US history, geography, environmental history, and mass media. I also emphasize collective memory, inclusion and exclusion, and the building of historical narratives. 

Write to me here.