Event Postponed:

As a precautionary measure, our campus is operating remotely from today, March 11 through March 29 due to the evolving COVID-19 (Coronavirus) in New York City.

As a result, all on-campus events during this time frame have been postponed, including "Amity Shlaes Book Launch and Lunch - Great Society: A New History of the 1960s in America." We will be in contact with those who registered as soon as a new date is determined. We are sad to announce this, but we are excited to learn from Amity Shlaes and celebrate her new book when the time is right, and we hope you will be able to join us.

Join The King’s College community as we hear from Presidential Scholar Amity Shlaes on her book, Great Society: A New History of the 1960s in America, from 12:15 PM to 1:15 PM in the 5th Floor City Room. Doors open at 12:00 PM, and lunch is provided. Registration required.

About Amity Shlaes

Amity Shlaes is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: Graphic, a full length illustrated version of the same book drawn by Paul Rivoche, Coolidge, a full-length biography of the thirtieth president and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americas Crazy. National Review called the Forgotten Man “the finest history of the Great Depression ever written.” The Economist wrote of Coolidge that the book “deserves to be widely read” and made it an editor’s choice for 2013. The Forgotten Man: Graphic reached the number 1 spot in its bestseller category. Miss Shlaes is under contract to write “The Silent Majority,” a third volume on the twentieth century.

Miss Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, a national foundation based in the birthplace of President Coolidge. The Foundation’s goal is to share Coolidge with Americans, by hosting high school debate and events at the Coolidge site and through newer media. She is especially interested in education.

Miss Shlaes is winner of the Hayek Prize and currently chairs the jury for the prize, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. She has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary. In 2002 she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy, and later chaired the jury for that prize. In 2003, she was JP Morgan Fellow for finance and economy at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2004, she gave the Bradley lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Her lecture, titled “The Chicken versus the Eagle” looked at the effect of the National Recovery Administration on the entrepreneur in the New Deal. Over the years she has served at the Council on Foreign Relations (as senior fellow in economic history) and the George W. Bush Presidential Center, where she was one of four directors, working on economic program.

Miss Shlaes serves at Presidential Scholar at The King’s College, where she teaches Coolidge. Prior to teaching at King’s, Miss Shlaes taught at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Many readers know Miss Shlaes from the Wall Street Journal, where she served on the editorial board, writing on foreign policy, taxation and other topics, or from the Financial Times and Bloomberg, each of which carried her syndicated column over the years. Currently Miss Shlaes appears in print Forbes and in National Review. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale College, Miss Shlaes is married to fellow journalist and editor Seth Lipsky. The Lipskys have four children.

About Great Society: A New History of the 1960s in America

The author of the New York Times bestsellers The Forgotten Man and Coolidge offers a provocative and conversation-changing look at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and how its failures reverberate to this day.

In Great Society, Amity Shlaes argues that just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal overshadowed a generation of forgotten men, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society gave rise to a silent majority, a coterie of dispossessed citizens—made famous by Richard Nixon and celebrated by Donald Trump—who rejected what they saw as the federal government’s overreach. Drawing on her classic economic expertise and deep historical knowledge, Shlaes challenges the traditional narrative of 1960s America and Johnson’s experiment, recasting the story of the Great Society as a tale of hubris that remains consequential for America fifty years later.

Contemporary Americans share many of the concerns that bedeviled Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and their voters. Racial differences, economic opportunity and outcomes, abuse of political power, and establishment corruption trouble us now just as these issues preoccupied the nation then. Yet today, poverty remains intractable and is actually growing, and the costs of programs such as Medicare and Medicaid are spiraling as the number of people claiming benefits grows. The question the Great Society tried to answer remains the same: how can we build a better future for all Americans? Shlaes contends that only an understanding of the historical record can make optimism—and practical solutions—possible.

A deep analysis of the government policy that has shaped politics and society for fifty years, Great Society is an authoritative and well-reasoned reinterpretation of Johnson’s signature achievement and the momentous period in which it was conceived.

Contact

Contact the Events and Production department at events@tkc.edu or 646-930-0624 with questions.