For nearly 40 years, Ronald Reagan embodied American conservatism. For historians, understanding the American Right meant explaining Reagan’s rise to power and his enduring legacy. The 2016 election of Donald Trump, a different species of right-wing politician with no regard for the Reagan Revolution, exploded conventional explanations of the American Right. In this lecture, Bruce Schulman explores the historical meaning of Trump’s election. Culminating with Trump rather than Reagan, Schulman suggests, an entirely different history of American conservatism comes into view.
Professor Bruce J. Schulman is the William E. Huntington Professor of History at Boston University, currently working as the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he is completing a volume on the period 1896-1929 for the Oxford History of the United States.
His research focuses on 20th Century US history, particularly on the relationships between politics and broader cultural change.
He is the author of three books: From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1991); Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994); and The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Politics, and Society (N.Y.: Free Press, 2001). Schulman has edited six other books, and is a contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, as well as websites such as Politico and Reuters.
Introduction by Randall J. Stephens, Professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo.