Description: "The title 'The Unfinished Nation' is meant to suggest several things. It is a reminder of America's exceptional diversity of the degree to which, despite all the many efforts to build a single, uniform definition of the meaning of American nationhood, that meaning remains contested. It is a reference to the centrality of change in American history to the ways in which the nation has continually transformed itself and continues to do so in our own time. It is also a description of the writing of American history itself of the ways in which historians are engaged in a continuing, ever unfinished process of asking new questions"--
Brief description: Alan Brinkley (1949-2019) was the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University. He served as university provost at Columbia from 2003 to 2009. He authored works such as Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, which won the 1983 National Book Award; American History: Connecting with the Past; The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War; Liberalism and Its Discontents; Franklin D. Roosevelt; and The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century. He served as board chair of the National Humanities Center, board chair of the Century Foundation, and a trustee of Oxford University Press. He was also a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1998-1999 he was the Harmsworth Professor of History at Oxford University, and in 2011-2012 the Pitt Professor at the University of Cambridge. He won the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Award at Harvard and the Great Teacher Award at Columbia. He was educated at Princeton and Harvard.