Joseph John-Michael Ellis III (born July 18, 1943) is an American historian whose work focuses on the lives and times of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson won a National Book Award in 1997 and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History. Both books were bestsellers.
Early life and education
Ellis was born in Alexandria, Virginia, on July 18, 1943. 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, where Edmund S. Morgan directed his dissertation on a colonial American theologian. At William and Mary, Ellis was in ROTC.
Career
Ellis entered the United States Army in August 1969 and spent three years teaching history at the United States Military Academy at West Point before being discharged a captain in 1972. Ellis later joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College. In 1979, he was made full professor and later became the Ford Foundation Professor of History. He has also taught at Williams College and in the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts. His scholarly work has concentrated on the Founding Fathers of the United States, including biographies of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, the American Revolution, and the history of the Federalist Era, which lasted from 1788 to 1800.
Ellis served as dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts from 1980 to 1990; following that, he was named by the trustees to the endowed Ford Foundation Chair in history. Ellis retired from Mount Holyoke in 2012.
Presidential biographies
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.
John Adams
As a result of his research, Ellis believed that John Adams was underappreciated as the nation's second president; he worked to reveal the man's contributions and character. His book, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, led to a revival of interest in Adams and new appreciation for his achievements.
Thomas Jefferson
In his book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996), Ellis explored the character and personality of Jefferson, and his many contradictions. He emphasized how important privacy was to him, and how the president and statesman preferred to work behind the scenes in politics, through letters, meetings and discussions over dinners. Ellis noted Jefferson's success in this style.
In relation to one of the major questions about his private life, whether Jefferson had a liaison with his slave Sally Hemings, Ellis suggested that evidence was "inconclusive." His deep analysis of Jefferson's character led him to conclude that the statesman did not have the liaison. Specifically, Ellis says in the appendix to American Sphinx:
<blockquote>Unless the trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation decide to exhume the remains and do DNA testing on Jefferson as well as some of his alleged progeny, it leaves the matter a mystery about which advocates on either side can freely speculate... This means that for those who demand an answer the only recourse is plausible conjecture, prefaced as it must be with profuse statements about the flimsy and wholly circumstantial character of the evidence. In that spirit, which we might call the spirit of responsible speculation, after five years mulling over the huge cache of evidence that does exist on the thought and character of the historical Jefferson, I have concluded that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote.</blockquote>
On November 5, 1998, Dr. Eugene Foster and his team published the results of Y-DNA analysis of Jefferson male-line descendants (he had no known male descendants but Y-DNA is passed on virtually unchanged through direct male-line descendants) and descendants of others reputed to be associated with him. Foster reported that DNA results showed a match between the Jefferson male line and the descendant of Eston Hemings. Given that and other historical evidence, they concluded that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston and probably of Sally Hemings' other children. The study showed no match between the Carr line, named by two of Jefferson's grandchildren as the father(s) of Hemings' children, and the Eston Hemings descendant, disproving the major alternative to Thomas Jefferson as father.
George Washington
In His Excellency: George Washington (2004), Ellis sought to penetrate myth and examine Washington during three major periods of his life. Ellis described how Washington's experiences in earlier leadership contributed to his actions and development as president. Ellis wrote that "we do not need another epic [Washington biography], but rather a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington's character", which the critic Jonathan Yardley said he had achieved. Ellis falsely claimed that he had been involved in protests in the civil rights movement and anti-war movement in the 1960s. He cited rumors at Mount Holyoke campus that he had served in Vietnam but would not talk about it because of some disturbing experience as something that led him to fabricate claims of service. He said that he had felt guilty about not actually serving in Vietnam. However, Ellis was prohibited from again teaching his course on the 1960s, during which most of his fabrications were made.
Publications
Books
{| class="wikitable"
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!Title!!Year!!ISBN!!Publisher!!Subject matter!!Interviews, presentations, and reviews!!Comments
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|The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696–1772||1973||||Yale University Press||Samuel Johnson|| ||
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|School for Soldiers: West Point and the Profession of Arms||1974||||Oxford University Press||United States Military Academy|| ||Written with Robert Moore
|-
|After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture||1979||||W. W. Norton|| || ||
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|Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams||1993||||W. W. Norton||John Adams||Booknotes interview with Ellis on Passionate Sage, September 5, 1993, C-SPAN||
|-
|American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson||1996||||Alfred A. Knopf||Thomas Jefferson||Presentation by Ellis on American Sphinx, February 23, 1997, C-SPAN||Winner of the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction
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|His Excellency: George Washington||2004||||Alfred A. Knopf||George Washington||Presentation by Ellis on His Excellency: George Washington, December 16, 2004, C-SPAN<br>Presentation by Ellis on His Excellency: George Washington, September 24, 2005, C-SPAN||
|-
|American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic||2007||||Alfred A. Knopf|| ||Discussion with Ellis on American Creation, November 29, 2007, C-SPAN<br>Interview with Ellis on American Creation, September 8, 2008, EconTalk||
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|First Family: Abigail and John Adams||2010||||Alfred A. Knopf||Abigail Adams, John Adams||Presentation by Ellis on First Family, October 27, 2010, C-SPAN||
|-
|Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence||2013||||Alfred A. Knopf|| ||Presentation by Ellis on Revolutionary Summer, July 17, 2013, C-SPAN||
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|The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789||2015||||Alfred A. Knopf|| ||The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution , National Archives, May 12, 2015<br>Presentation by Ellis on The Quartet, May 14, 2015, C-SPAN<br>Presentation by Ellis on The Quartet, September 5, 2015, C-SPAN||
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|American Dialogue: The Founders and Us||2018||||Alfred A. Knopf|| ||Presentation by Ellis on American Dialogue, October 16, 2018, C-SPAN||
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|The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783||2021||||Liveright Publishing|| ||Presentation by Ellis on The Cause, September 19, 2021, C-SPAN<br>Interview with Ellis on The Cause, October 10, 2021, C-SPAN||
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|The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding||2025||||Alfred A. Knopf|| ||
|}
Essays
- long listing
- "1776, the summer America was born", Salon.com, Jun 16, 2013
- "Madison’s Radical Agenda", American Heritage, Winter 2010
- "Inventing the Presidency", American Heritage, October 2004.
- "Intimate Enemies" (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson), American Heritage, September 2000.
Editorials
- "Tea party wants to take America back -- to the 18th century," Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed, October 15, 2013.
- "A promise of unpredictability: Presidential candidates pledge a lot, but history says you can ignore most of it" - Los Angeles Times (Jan 2, 2008)
- "What Would George Do?: Okay, He Never Saw a Chopper, but He Can Still Teach Us a Thing or Two." - Washington Post (Dec 23, 2007)
- "Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History " - New York Times (Jan 28, 2006)
Notes
External links
- Biography from The Pulitzer Board
- Biography from Mount Holyoke