Book by Zelizer Named Winner of D.B. Hardeman Prize

Jun 07 2018
By Staff
Topics Politics

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation awarded the D.B. Hardeman Prize to Julian E. Zelizer’s book, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society,” published in 2015 by the Penguin Press. The $10,000 prize is awarded annually for the best book on the U.S. Congress, from the fields of biography, history, journalism and political science.

Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a CNN political analyst. He is the author and editor of 19  books on American political history, has written hundreds of op-eds, and appears regularly on television and radio. He has received fellowships at the New York Historical Society, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, New America and Brookings.

In “The Fierce Urgency of Now,” Zelizer provides insight into the years between November 1962 and November 1966 when President Lyndon Baines Johnson spearheaded the most transformative agenda in American politics since the New Deal. Zelizer relays the epic story of how this agenda of progressive initiatives — known as the Great Society — came to pass, by examining the bitterly divided forces at play in the country, including the battles that raged inside Congress and the administration.

About the D.B. Hardeman Prize

D. Barnard Hardeman Jr. was a teacher, politician and political advisor. He was a member of the Texas legislature before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1957 to serve as assistant to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. After Rayburn’s death in 1961, Hardeman worked for Majority Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana, and in 1964 the American Political Science Association named him the first Honorary Congressional Fellow. Upon his death in 1981, Hardeman bequeathed the seed money to create the prize that bears his name, as well as his extensive collection of books on American history and biography, to the LBJ Presidential Library.