- Speaker
- Douglas Brinkley
- Lecture date
- Originally aired: April 18th, 2023
- Time
- 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
- Title
- Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening
Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and a professor of history at Rice University, the CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards, 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 his most recent book, Silent Spring Revolution, Brinkley chronicles the rise of environmental activism during the Long Sixties, telling a highly charged story of an indomitable generation of activists who combated environmental destruction under the leadership of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. In a fast-evolving era when the nation is witnessing new types of environmental crises due to climate change and resource exhaustion, Brinkley’s meticulously researched and deftly written book reminds readers of the passionate grassroots work that still needs to be done.
His book American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race was a New York Times bestseller. In addition, Cronkite won the Sperber Prize while The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast 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 recently won the Arthur S. Link — Warren F. Kuehl Prize. He is a member of the Century Association, 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.