This six-part virtual series explores these questions and others through lively conversations with leading historians of American politics and the presidency. Each session will begin with a moderated discussion led by LBJ Library Director Mark Lawrence, but will allow ample time for questions from the audience. For the six weeks leading up to President's Day, we will travel through American political history, delving into the elections of 1860, 1896, 1948, 1964, 1968 and 1980. We will examine presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan, exploring the races that took place. elevated them to the Oval Office and the implications of the races they won.
About the speaker:
Luke A. Nichter is professor of history and James H. Cavanaugh Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University. His area of specialty is the Cold War, the modern presidency, and the political and diplomatic history of the United States, with an emphasis on the "long 1960s" from John F. Kennedy to Watergate. He has been a visiting scholar at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, an Andrew W. Mellon scholar at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a visiting scholar at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan, a senior visiting scholar at the Rothermere American of the University of Oxford. Hansard Institute and Research Fellow at the London School of Economics.
He is a New York Times bestselling author or editor of eight books, including, most recently, The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 (Yale University Press). It is the first rigorously researched historical account of the most controversial election in modern U.S. history to benefit from the cooperation of all four major camps – Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and George Wallace. Luke interviewed approximately 85 family members and former staffers, in addition to extensive archival research and access to new evidence that radically changes our understanding of the election. This work received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Luke's last book was The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War (Yale University Press). It is the first comprehensive biography of Lodge – whose public career spanned the 1930s to the 1970s – based on extensive multilingual archival research. This work received a public research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also the author of Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Postwar Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press), based on multilingual archival research in six countries, and is currently working on a book tentatively titled LBJ: The White House . Lyndon Johnson Years.
He is a recognized expert on the secret recordings of Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House through Richard Nixon and wrote an authoritative history of their recording systems commissioned by the White House Historical Association. His website, nixontapes.org, featured on CBS Sunday Morning, was the basis for the New York Times bestseller, The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Co-edited with Douglas Brinkley, with a consecutive volume, The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the volumes won the Arthur S. Link – Warren F. Kuehl Prize for Nonfiction Editing, awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Luke received his Ph.D. He holds a doctorate in history from Bowling Green State University and lives in Orange, California, and Bowling Green, Ohio.
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