Presidential historian to open Bucknell Forum
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Updated March 25, 2008
LEWISBURG, Pa. -- Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will lead off the fall Bucknell Forum national speaker series with a talk highlighting the semester's theme of "Power and the President."
Goodwin is scheduled to speak at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 30 in the
Goodwin's visit will precede by a week a talk by renowned presidential biographer David McCullough, who has been named the 2008 Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters at Bucknell. Though not a Bucknell Forum event, McCullough's talk will add to the forum's ongoing discussion of this year's presidential election.
Revered and well-known
"Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough are two of the most revered and well-known presidential historians and biographers of our time, and it is a great privilege to have them both visit our campus within weeks of the November presidential election," Bucknell President Brian C. Mitchell said.
Goodwin has studied and written about several of the country's most influential presidents and their legacies. Her most recent book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005), was a New York Times best-seller and winner of the 2006 Lincoln Prize for an outstanding work about the president, the inaugural New York Historical Society Book Prize, the Richard Nelson Current award, and the New York State Archives History Makers Award.
Steven Spielberg is developing a feature film about the book, set to star Liam Neeson as
ABC miniseries
Goodwin is also the author of Lyndon Johnson & The American Dream (1976) and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987), which was made into a six-hour ABC miniseries in 1990. Both books were New York Times best-sellers as well.
In 1995, she won the Pulitzer Prize for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II. The book also was a Times best-seller and won the Harold Washington Literary Award, the New England Bookseller Association Award, the Ambassador Book Award, and the Washington Monthly Book Award.
Goodwin also has reported on politics and baseball for more than two decades for leading national publications and network television programs. She is a commentator for NBC and a consultant and on-air personality for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy Family, and Franklin Roosevelt, and for Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball. She was the first female journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room.
Assistant to Lyndon Johnson
Goodwin received a bachelor's degree from
The Bucknell Forum: The Citizen & Politics in
Focusing on major issues in the 2008 presidential election, the Bucknell Forum series features nationally renowned leaders, scholars, and commentators who are examining issues at the forefront of today's national discourse from multi-disciplinary perspectives and a diversity of viewpoints in a model for civil discourse. The series will run through the inauguration of the new
The fall 2008 theme is "Power and the President."
This past spring, "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer led off a lineup that included a panel of religion experts who discussed the role of religion in politics and best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich, who talked about citizenship and class. Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts rounded out the spring series with a talk titled "
The fall 2007 lineup included NBC newsman Tim Russert, a panel of national political correspondents, and renowned political theorist Benjamin Barber.
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