He had completed a 218-page senior thesis titled "The Gospel of Discontent: Huey Long in National Politics 1932-1935."
His doctoral dissertation, "The Long and Coughlin Movements: Dissident Voices in the Great Depression", was directed by Frank Freidel, an authority on Franklin D.
Here he argued that the two demagogues were not proto-fascists, but represented genuine popular anxieties rooted in the American experience of the Great Depression.
[9] He was the chair of the board of the Century Foundation in New York and chairman of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.
In 2018, Columbia University Press published Alan Brinkley: A Life in History, edited by David Greenberg, Moshik Temkin, and Mason B. Williams.
Brinkley assumed sole responsibility for the ninth edition of American History: A Survey from historians Richard N. Current, Frank Freidel, and T. Harry Williams.
Historian Emil Pocock, evaluating Brinkley’s 1995 revision, said it was He lived in Manhattan, New York with his wife, Evangeline Morphos, and his daughter, Elly.