Professor Nancy Beck Young, Department of History, University of Houston. Nancy Beck Young is a historian of twentieth-century American politics, who also has interests in public history and digital humanities. Her research questions how ideology has shaped public policy and political institutions. Much of her work involves study of Congress, the presidency, electoral politics, and first ladies. Dr Young is also interested in Texas political history, especially Texans in Washington. She joined the faculty of the University of Houston in 2007 after teaching for ten years at McKendree College in Illinois. She has held fellowships at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Along with colleague Leandra Zarnow, she was awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host a 2017 Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers entitled Gender, the State, and the 1977 International Women’s Year Conference. In 2021, Young and Zarnow received a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund work on Sharing Stories from 1977: Putting the National Women’s Conference on the Map.
Abstract: The 1964 presidential election had two winners. Lyndon Johnson won by a landslide and claimed the presidency in his own right, but if not Barry Goldwater than at least the ideas of modern conservatism also won. Goldwater made it possible for a full-throated conservative to prevail in the Republican Party, and his campaign also suggested strategies whereby a conservative could compete and win the presidency. I argue that the 1964 contest was an important turning point in the political evolution of the United States from the leftward politics of FDR and the New Deal toward the rightward politics of Ronald Reagan.
