Alan Brinkley papers on Henry R. Luce, 1910-2009, bulk 1922-1965

Alan Brinkley (1949-2019) was the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University. He specialized in the political history of the twentieth-century United States. From 2003 to 2009, he was University Provost, and from 2000 to 2003 chair of the Department of History. In 1998-1999, he was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University, and in 2011-2012, he was the Pitt Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge.

Brinkley was the author of several books, including the political histories Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (1982) and The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995); the biographies Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2009), The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (2010), and John F. Kennedy (2012); and several editions of the textbook American History: A Survey.

Brinkley was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Ann (Fischer) and David Brinkley, a long-time television newscaster at NBC and ABC whose papers are also archived at the RBML. He attended the Landon School, a private boys' preparatory school in Bethesda, Maryland, between 1958 and 1967.

Brinkley graduated with an A.B. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1971. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1979. His doctoral dissertation, "The Long and Coughlin Movements: Dissident Voices in the Great Depression", was directed by historian Frank Freidel.

Before coming to Columbia in 1991, Brinkley taught at MIT, Harvard, and the City University of New York.

In 1989 Brinkley married Evangeline Morphos, a theater and television producer who held a doctorate in 18th-century English literature and taught theater and film at Columbia.

On June 16, 2019, Brinkley died at his home in Manhattan.