Jennifer Burns, Hoover Research Fellow and Associate Professor of History at Stanford, presented “The Last Conservative: The Lives and Times of Milton Friedman,” where she discussed a chapter of her new biography of Milton Friedman, arguably Hoover’s most famous economist.  Burns is a historian of the twentieth-century US who focuses on the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history.

She has a particular interest in the evolution of American conservatism, having also written a life of Ayn Rand. She also organized the Library & Archives workshop on Political Economy, which invited researchers from diverse fields to study the history of economic through the archives of notable thinkers such as Friedman and Friedrich A. Hayek.
 

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

This talk is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.