The Thought Project - Episode 50 - Interview with Blanche Wiesen Cook

This week’s guest, Blanche Wiesen Cook, is a distinguished professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she also teaches in the women's studies program. Cook is the author or editor of seven books including the seminal trilogy of Eleanor Roosevelt — the only trilogy published about an American woman — which she completed 35 years after embarking on what she presumed to be a one-volume biography. Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962, the final volume, was completed in 2016.

Until she took on the Eleanor Roosevelt project, Cook considered herself a “hard historian,” or a military historian. In 1981, she published the controversial The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare, which made The New York Times best-sellers list.

Eisenhower’s and Roosevelt’s legacies serve to inform the public’s understanding of contemporary events. Cook is the expert historian to help us contextualize today’s events in a world that seems challenged at every turn.

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Access the transcript.

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Photo credit: Alex Irklievski