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Joseph Ellis

Joseph Ellis
Joseph ellis 2007.jpg
Joseph Ellis in 2007
Born Joseph John Ellis
(1943-07-18) July 18, 1943 (age 73)
Washington, D.C.
Occupation Professor, writer
Nationality American
Alma mater College of William and Mary (BA)
Yale University (M.A.) (PhD)
Period 1973–
Genre History
Subject U.S., c. 1770 to 1828
Notable works Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Website
www.josephellishistorian.com
External video
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution , National Archives, May 12, 2015

Joseph John Ellis (born July 18, 1943) is an American historian and professor whose work focuses on the lives and times of the founders of the United States of America. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson won a National Book Award and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History. Both these books were bestsellers.

He received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary, where he was initiated into Theta Delta Chi. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1969. He taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Ellis later joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College; in 1979 he was made full professor. He is also a Ford Foundation Professor. His work has concentrated on the Founding Fathers of the United States, including biographies of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, the Revolution and the early Federalist years.

Ellis served as dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke (1980-1990); following that, he was named by the trustees to the endowed Ford Foundation Chair in history. For part of 1984, he also served as Acting President while President Elizabeth Topham Kennan was on leave. Ellis was suspended without pay (due to controversy over his alleged service in Vietnam) from his endowed chair in 2001; he was reappointed to the chair in 2005.

Ellis currently teaches at the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with his wife Ellen Wilkins Ellis, and is the father of three adult sons.

Together with histories of the founding of the republic, since 1993 Ellis has written biographies about individual early presidents and, in 2010, a joint biography of John and Abigail Adams. Interested in how men shaped and were shaped by their times, he writes with a novelist's emphasis on character. Ellis is notable as a respected scholar whose work has also gained popular success; his biography of Jefferson and work on the Founding Fathers have been bestsellers, attaining sales of hundreds of thousands of copies. In 2004, the critic Jonathan Yardley wrote of him: "Ellis doubtless is now the most widely read scholar of the Revolutionary period, and thus probably the most influential as well -- at least among the general public..."


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