Announcing a National History Center Seminar Panel with Kai Bird on The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

Monday, July 12 at 4:00 pm ET

Click here to register for the webinar

Space in the Zoom webinar is available on a first-come first-serve basis and fills up very quickly, if you are unable to join the session or receive an error message you can still watch on the NHC’s Facebook Page or the Wilson Center website 

 

Pulitzer-winning historian Kai Bird (The Good Spy) discerns much positive achievement in Carter’s one-term presidency, including airline deregulation that made flying cheap; prescient energy policies that boosted domestic energy supplies and solar power; human rights initiatives…and the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement… Bird skillfully paints Carter as a mix of genuine idealism and “clear-eyed ruthlessness” behind a folksy facade, and shrewdly analyzes the forces of stagflation, deindustrialization, and U.S. imperial decline—capped by the Iran hostage crisis—that hobbled him. The result is a lucid, penetrating portrait that should spur reconsideration of Carter’s much-maligned presidency.

 

Panelists:

Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who has published biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Ames—and now The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. He has also authored a memoir about his childhood in the Middle East. He is the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Meg Jacobs teaches history and public affairs at Princeton University. She is author of many books and articles about American political history, including her work on the 1970s. She is currently writing a book about the Great Depression and World War II.

 

The seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.