Alan Brinkley


Alan Brinkley was an American political historian who taught for over 20 years at Columbia University. He was the Allan Nevins Professor of History until his death. From 2003 to 2009, he was University Provost.

Early life

Brinkley was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Ann and David Brinkley, a long-time television newscaster at NBC and ABC. Alan was a brother of Joel Brinkley. Brinkley graduated with an A.B. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1971 after completing a 218-page long senior thesis titled "The Gospel of Discontent: Huey Long in National Politics 1932-1935." He later received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1979 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The Long and Coughlin movements: dissident voices in the Great Depression."

Career

Brinkley's scholarship has focused mainly on the period of the Great Depression and World War II. Among his books are Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, which won the National Book Award; ' ; Liberalism and its Discontents ; and ', which won the Ambassador Book Prize and the Sperber Prize, as well as being a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of two short biographies: Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
His essay "The Problem of American Conservatism" was published in the American Historical Review in 1994.
He was one of three American historians to have been both Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford and Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge. He was an honorary fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. He received the Jerome Levenson Teaching Prize in 1982 at Harvard University, where Brinkley taught for seven years; and the Great Teacher Award at Columbia in 2003.
He was the chair of the board of the Century Foundation in New York, and he was the chairman of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. He was also a trustee of Oxford University Press from 2009 to 2012, and a trustee of the Dalton School.
In 2018, Columbia University Press published Alan Brinkley: A Life in History, edited by David Greenberg, Moshik Temkin, and Mason B. Williams. The book includes essays about Brinkley's scholarship and career by many of his doctoral advisees as well as personal essays by friends and colleagues of his including A. Scott Berg, Frank Rich, and Nicholas Lemann.

Textbooks

Brinkley was the senior author of two best-selling, frequently updated American history textbooks, American History: A Survey and The Unfinished Nation. They are widely used in universities and in AP United States History high school classes. He also wrote the commonly used AP US History textbook American History: Connecting With The Past.
Brinkley took over sole responsibility for the ninth edition of the American History: A Survey textbook from historians Richard N. Current, Frank Freidel, and T. Harry Williams. He had joined the team to help with the 1979 revisions.
Historian Emil Pocock, evaluating the ninth edition of 1995, said it is:

Personal details

He lived in New York with his wife, Evangeline Morphos, and his daughter, Elly.
He died from complications of frontotemporal dementia.

Works