The Ph.D. Program in History

at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

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March 8 Leon Levy Center for Biography: Annual Conference on Biography: “Political Icons: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Participants include David Nasaw and Blanche Wiesen Cook

 

An afternoon series of four events, free and open to the public. Reservations are required for the final event, Israel and Palestine through Memoir and Biography. Register here with Graduate Center Public Programs. If you plan to attend only the earlier events, simply RSVP by email to biography@gc.cuny.edu.

1:30pm – 8pm Wednesday, March 8, 2017. Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Ave., at 34th St.)

1:30 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. Introductory Remarks

 

1:45 p.m. – 3 p.m. Liberal Icons

David Nasaw (award-winning biographer of Joseph Kennedy, Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst), with Blanche Wiesen Cook (author of the three-volume biography, Eleanor Roosevelt), Patricia Bell-Scott (The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice), and David Levering-Lewis (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois).

 

3:15 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Daniel Oppenheimer in Conversation with Kai Bird

Daniel Oppenheimer (Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century) discusses the strange political odysseys of Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens.

 

4:45 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. Presidential Transitions

Meg Jacobs (Research Scholar, Princeton University, and author of Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s), with Robert Dallek (author of presidential biographies of FDR, JFK, LBJ and Nixon), John Farrell (Richard Nixon: The Life), and Michael Tomasky (Bill Clinton).

 

6:30 p.m. – 7:45 p.m. Israel and Palestine through Memoir and Biography

Sari Nusseibeh (Once upon a Country: A Palestinian Life and The Story of Reason in Islam) and Dan Ephron (Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel) speak with Kai Bird (Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age between the Arabs and Israelis).