Research Seminar: The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968

The 1968 presidential race was a contentious battle between Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Republican Richard Nixon, and former Alabama governor George Wallace. The United States was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and was bitterly divided on the Vietnam War and domestic issues, including civil rights and rising crime. In The Year That Broke Politics, Luke A. Nichter draws on previously unexamined archives and numerous interviews, and upends conventional understanding of the crucial campaign, showing how it created a new template and tone for election battles, which still resonates into today’s fractured political climate.

Luke A. Nichter is a Professor of History and James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University. His area of speciality is the Cold War, the modern presidency, and U.S. political and diplomatic history, with a focus on the "long 1960s" from John F. Kennedy through Watergate. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan's Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute, and a Hansard Research Scholar at the London School of Economics. For 2024-25, the Leverhulme Trust awarded him a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at York St. John University in York (UK).