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The Art of Presidential Biography


It was a great pleasure to present Presidential historian and bestselling author Douglas Brinkley with his genealogy at the American Ancestors-New England Historic Genealogical Society dinner in Brookline, Massachusetts, on July 25, 2019, when he spoke on "the Art of Presidential Biography."

I had the pleasure of revealing that Douglas Brinkley is related to three American presidents, and give him a meticulously-produced genealogy compiled by NEHGS staff experts, including Dr. Meaghan Siekman and Nancy Bernard with additions by Gary Boyd Roberts, Senior Research Scholar Emeritus.

Dr. Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, a CNN presidential historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Among his books are Cronkite, The Great Deluge, and The Wilderness Warrior. His critically acclaimed recent work, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, has been heralded by Pulitzer Prize-winner and NEHGS Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Doris Kearns Goodwin as "absolutely first rate. As history, it is inspiring and enthralling."

Pictured: Douglas Brinkley, Maggie Baxter of NBC, and Brenton Simons

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