Alan Brinkley,70; commentator, liberal historian
NEW YORK (AP) — Alan Brinkley, an influential historian and academic who traced the evolution of liberalism from the New Deal to the 21st century and was a popular commentator on culture and politics, has died at age 70.
Brinkley died Sunday at his home in Manhattan. Daughter Elly Brinkley says he died of complications from a disease related to Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS.
One of four children of network anchorman David Brinkley, Alan Brinkley grew up in a home where guests included John F. Kennedy and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and politics, history and culture were all-day conversations. He became a National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist and prominent author of two widely used American history textbooks. He also taught at Harvard University and Columbia University, which he joined in 1991. At Columbia, he served as University Provost from 2003-2009.
“Alan Brinkley: A Life in History,” a tribute featuring contributions from critic-”Veep” producer Frank Rich, biographer A. Scott Berg and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner, came out in January.
“Alan Brinkley is brilliant, insightful, generous, open-minded, loyal — all the things you want in a colleague, friend, teacher and scholar,” Foner, a fellow Columbia professor, wrote in the book’s introduction.
Liberalism and the forces opposed to it were the themes of much of Brinkley’s work. He came of age in the 1950s and ‘60s, when conservatism seemed so far outside the mainstream that critic Lionel Trilling declared liberalism “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” But by the end of the ‘60s, with the rise of the socalled New Right and divisions among liberals brought on by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, critics and scholars were reconsidering their “consensus” that only liberal thought mattered.
“Nothing has become clearer over the past 30 years — both in historical scholarship and in our experience as a society — than that the consensus agreement, on that point at least, was wrong,” Brinkley wrote in 1998.