"All the Things You Want in a Colleague, Friend, Teacher and Scholar"

"Liberalism and the forces opposed to it were the themes of much of Brinkley's work. He came of age in the 1950s and '60s, when conservatism seemed so far outside the mainstream that critic Lionel Trilling declared liberalism 'not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.' But by the end of the '60s, with the rise of the so-called New Right and divisions among liberals brought on by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, critics and scholars were reconsidering their 'consensus' that only liberal thought mattered.
"'Nothing has become clearer over the past 30 years—both in historical scholarship and in our experience as a society—than that the consensus agreement, on that point at least, was wrong,' Brinkley wrote in 1998."

Hillel Italie at the PBS Newshour writes an obituary for historian Alan Brinkley.

Eric Foner at The Nation, David Greenberg at Time, and Yanek Mieczkowski at History News Network write appreciations.