Douglas Brinkley

Speaker Series sponsored by Eileen and Jon Otto.

David Brinkley, American Historian and Best-Selling Author; Presidential Historian, CNN; Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, offers his perspective and insight, post-2024 Presidential Election.

About Douglas Brinkley
Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and is on the Board of the National Archives Foundation, The Library of Congress (James Madison Council), and the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. Additionally, he is the CNN Presidential Historian and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He works in many capacities in public history, including museums, colleges, and historical societies. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him "America's New Past Master." The New-York Historical Society has chosen Brinkley as their official U.S. Presidential Historian.
In 2022, he published Silent Spring Revolution, which chronicles the rise of environmental activism during the Long Sixties and tells the story of an indomitable generation that saved the natural world under the leadership of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. Doris Kearns Goodwin praised it as "not only a majestic work of history; it is an urgent call for our time."
Brinkley's other books include American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, a New York Times bestseller, Cronkite, which won the Sperber Prize, and The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has received a Grammy Award for Presidential Suite and seven honorary doctorates in American Studies. His two-volume annotated The Nixon Tapes won the Arthur S. Link – Warren F. Kuehl Prize.

Brinkley is a board member of the National Archives Foundation, a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, and the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.