UK’s Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Lecture to feature presidential historian Douglas Brinkley

Presidential historian and noted author Douglas Brinkley will be the featured speaker at the University of Kentucky’s 2024 Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Lecture, 5:30 p.m. Oct. 8, at the Singletary Center for the Arts.

Hosted by UK’s Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, and co-sponsored by UK Libraries and the College of Communication and Information, the lecture is free and open to the public.

Brinkley, a well-known expert on U.S. presidents and American history, is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University. His appearance at UK will come exactly four weeks before the Nov. 5 election.

“Douglas Brinkley is one of the foremost historians and political observers of our time,” said Ron Zimmer, director of UK’s Martin School. “We are looking forward with great anticipation to hearing his perspective on the upcoming presidential election.”

Brinkley was one of three nationally recognized historians called on by C-SPAN in 2000 to develop a framework for the first Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership. The group recommended 10 qualities of presidential leadership and helped design the survey’s organization, execution and analysis of the results. Brinkley today remains part of the C-SPAN core group, which released its most recent presidential rankings in 2021.

In 2022, Brinkley published Silent Spring Revolution, which chronicles the rise of environmental activism during the 1960s. Fellow historian Doris Kearns Goodwin praised it as “not only a majestic work of history; it is an urgent call for our time.”

He also has published nonfiction books on Dean Acheson, Jimmy Carter, Walter Cronkite, Gerald Ford, Henry Ford, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Rosa Parks, Ronald Reagan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt. Six of his books have been selected as “Notable Books of the Year” by the New York Times and seven made the Times’ bestseller list.

Brinkley holds a bachelor’s degree from the Ohio State University and master’s and doctoral degrees from Georgetown University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Century Association, Society of American Historians and James Madison Council of the Library of Congress. He is on the Board of Trustees at Brevard College and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

The lecture is held in honor of Kentucky’s 49th governor and U.S. Sen. Wendell H. Ford, who lectured at the UK Martin School after retiring from the Senate in 1999.

This year’s event marks the 10th anniversary of the Ford Lecture. The first lecture was held Nov. 13, 2014 with former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming as the featured speaker.