Alan Brinkley was born in 1949. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University and taught at MIT and Harvard as well as City University of New York and Princeton University before joining the Columbia faculty in 1991. He is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, where he was also Provost from 2003 - 2009. He is a historian of the New Deal. A prolific essayist, Brinkley writes regularly in magazines such as The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, Newsweek and The New Republic and is an advocate for progressive issues. Brinkley has won a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Book Award for History, and numerous other prizes and… fellowships, and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves as a board member or trustee of several academic and policy research institutions and chairs the board of The Century Foundation. His works include Liberalism and Its Discontents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.
Frank R. Parker is Director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C. He was a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi from 1968 to 1981.Frank R. Parker is Director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C. He was a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi from 1968 to 1981.