Eagle Society

Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University. Additionally, he is a frequent contributor to CNN, CBS, and MSNBC as a Presidential Historian. He works in many capacities in public history, including museums, colleges, and historical societies, and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.” The New-York Historical 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 two Grammy Awards, one for Presidential Suite (large jazz band ensemble) and for Fandango at the Wall (best Latin Jazz) as well eight 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, the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.