Brinkley was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Ann (Fischer) and David Brinkley, a long-time television newscaster at NBC and ABC. Alan was a brother of Joel Brinkley. He attended the Landon School, a private boys' preparatory schoolinBethesda, Maryland,[4] between 1958 and 1967.[5] In 2011, the Alan Brinkley ’67 Lecture Series at Landon was created in his honor.[5]
Brinkley's scholarship focused mainly on the period of the Great Depression and World War II. Among his books are Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1983),[8][a] which won the National Book Award. Here he argued that the two demagogues were not proto-fascists, but represented genuine popular anxieties rooted in the American experience of the Great Depression. He also wrote The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995); Liberalism and its Discontents (1998); and The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (2010), which won the Ambassador Book Prize and the Sperber Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote two short biographies: Franklin D. Roosevelt (2009) and John F. Kennedy (2012).
His essay "The Problem of American Conservatism" was published in the American Historical Review in 1994 and sparked scholarly interest in a neglected topic.
He was one of three American historians to have been both Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford (1998–1999) and Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge (2011–2012). He was an honorary fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. He received the Jerome Levenson Teaching Prize in 1982 at Harvard University, where Brinkley taught for seven years; and the Great Teacher Award at Columbia University in 2003, where he also became provost on July 1 of that year.[9]
In 2018, Columbia University Press published Alan Brinkley: A Life in History, edited by David Greenberg, Moshik Temkin, and Mason B. Williams. The book includes essays about Brinkley's scholarship and career by many of his doctoral advisees as well as personal essays by friends and colleagues of his including A. Scott Berg, Frank Rich, and Nicholas Lemann.
Brinkley was the senior author of two best-selling American history textbooks, American History: A Survey and The Unfinished Nation. They are widely used in universities and in AP United States History high school classes. He also wrote the commonly-used AP US History textbook American History: Connecting with the Past.
Brinkley assumed sole responsibility for the ninth edition of American History: A Survey from historians Richard N. Current, Frank Freidel, and T. Harry Williams. He had joined the team to help with the 1979 revisions. Historian Emil Pocock, evaluating Brinkley’s 1995 revision, said it was
Typical of the mass market textbook. ... Brinkley offers a traditional narrative of American history. Built around a core of political and economic events, this attractive colored text contains a good selection of illustrations, maps, charts, and other graphics, as well as other features designed to make it stand out among the competition. ... This latest edition has integrated additional material on immigrants, Native Americans, African-Americans, and women into the political narrative.[10]
America in the Twentieth Century (1960), co-authored with Frank Freidel; 5th ed. published in 1982 – used in college 20th century U.S. history classes.[11]
1982 Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression — winner of the National Book Award[8][a][13]
1992 The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (2 vols.). Later eds. are co-written by Harvey H. Jackson and Bradley Robert Rice.[14][15]
1995 The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War[16]
1997 New Federalist Papers: Essays in Defense of the Constitution with Nelson W. Polsby and Kathleen M. Sullivan
Brinkley, Alan. “The Challenges and Rewards of Textbook Writing: An Interview with Alan Brinkley.” Journal of American History 91#4 (2005): 1391–97 online.
Greenberg, David. “After Reform: The Odyssey of American Liberalism in Liberalism and its Discontents.” in Alan Brinkley: A Life in History, edited by David Greenberg et al., (2019), pp. 39–52, online.
