How Did We Get Here: The First Hundred Days of an Unprecedented Presidency
For the Kinder Institute’s biennial Distinguished Lecture, world-renowned presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will reflect on more than a century of U.S. history to put into context the critical first 100 Days of a president’s term: the pressure-packed period filled with struggles and surprises that has become widely recognized as a bellwether of presidential performance. Tapping into the energy, action, and ambition of previous administrations with their own challenges and unfolding agendas, Goodwin will educate and entertain the audience with stories of presidents past, whose setbacks and triumphs shed light on the political transformations that have produced today’s turbulent times. After five decades of studying the presidency, Goodwin finds hope in the knowledge that however fractured our modern political culture has become, our democracy has survived—even thrived—through more troubling times in the past.
A world-renowned and Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author of six critically acclaimed and New York Times best-selling books, most recently The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (Simon & Schuster, 2013). Her other titles include No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (Simon & Schuster 1994), for which she received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in history, Wait Till Next Year (Simon & Schuster, 1998), Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (St. Martin’s, 1977), and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (St. Martin’s, 1991), which was adapted into an award-winning, five-part TV miniseries. Her 2005 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster), which received the prestigious Lincoln Prize and the New York Historical Society’s inaugural American History Book Prize, was highly influential to the production of Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-nominated film Lincoln, on which Goodwin worked. Goodwin graduated magna cum laude from Colby College, where she was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and she received a Doctor of Philosophy in Government from Harvard University. Please click here for a complete bio of Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Free and open to the public, the Distinguished Lecture will be held on November 6, 2017, at 7:00 PM in Jesse Auditorium on the University of Missouri campus.