Jay Winik
| Jay Winik | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born |
February 8, 1957 New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer and historian |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
Yale College |
| Notable works | April 1865, The Great Upheaval, 1944 |
| Website | |
|
jaywinik | |
Jay Winik (born February 8, 1957) is a best-selling author and American historian who is best known for his classic work April 1865: The Month That Saved America.
Early life and education
Winik is an honors graduate of Yale College. He also holds an M.Sc.(Econ) from the London School of Economics with distinction and a Ph.D. from Yale University.
Having once dreamed of becoming a professional tennis player, he played on the Yale tennis team and was an editor of the Yale Daily News.[1] Before turning to history, he had a fleeting career in government, in foreign policy, which put him in the thick of civil wars around the globe, from the former Yugoslavia to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Cambodia, including helping to create the landmark United Nations plan to end Cambodia's civil war. In 1991, he took up writing history full-time.[2]
Career
The Baltimore Sun has called him “one of the nation's leading public historians.”[3] He is the author of the well-regarded bestseller April 1865 (2001), which also became a History Channel documentary and a stage production, both of which he featured in.[4] In 2007 Winik published The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, which both USA Today and The Financial Times picked as one of their “Best Books of the Year.”[5] Winik's latest book is 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History, also a best-seller.[6]
Winik has been read by political leaders including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell.[7] Winik appears on page 1 of Bush's presidential memoir, Decision Points, discussing the craft of writing history with the president.
Articles and commentary
Winik's articles, most especially his history book reviews, have been broadly published, including in the New York Times, Time magazine, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, to which he has regularly contributed history reviews and occasional essays about tennis and sports.[8] Having appeared on a wide range of such national broadcasts as The Today Show, Fresh Air and Morning Edition with Scott Simon, CNN, Good Morning America, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, he has provided frequent historical commentary for documentaries on the History Channel and PBS as well as C-SPAN, and was the Presidential Historian for FOX News for Barack Obama's historic inaugurations as well as Senator Ted Kennedy's funeral.
In 2002 he was a regular on the History Channel weekly show, The History Center. Most recently, he was a principal history commentator for the History Channel special Pearl Harbor: 24 Hours After. In 2013, he was a historical advisor to National Geographic and the consulting historian for their six-part series, The 1980s: The Decade That Made Us, which aired in over 100 countries.
In a New York Times op-ed essay, Winik correctly predicted a long guerrilla struggle in Iraq, while Time magazine noted that Winik's April 1865 was a powerful reminder about how a war's end is every bit as important as how or why it had begun.[9]
Public service
Winik serves as a trustee or advisory board member on a number of nonprofit boards, including for American Heritage Magazine, the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, Ford's Theatre Society, The Lincoln Legacy Project, The Civil War Preservation Trust, the Lincoln Forum, the Washington Tennis and Education Foundation, and the Potomac School, as well as the Governing Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.[10]
Memberships
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians.
Works
- The Great Upheaval. HarperCollins. 13 October 2009. ISBN 978-0-06-182671-9.
- April 1865: The Month That Saved America, G.K. Hall, 2001, ISBN 9780783895819; April 1865. HarperCollins. 16 November 2010. ISBN 978-0-06-202920-1.
- 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History, Simon & Schuster, 2015, ISBN 9781439114087
References
- ↑ April 1865, HarperCollins, 2006, P.S. Section
- ↑ The Great Upheaval, HarperCollins, 2008, P.S. Section
- ↑ Baltimore Sun, 10-14-2007
- ↑ Biography of Winik at http://jaywinik.com
- ↑ Amazon.com, The Great Upheaval, reviews section; Gordon Wood, The New York Review of Books, November 8, 2007
- ↑ "1944". simonandschuster.com. Retrieved 3 March 2015.
- ↑ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, December 25, 2008; The Washington Post, Reliable Source, September 28, 2007
- ↑ Jay Winik, The Wall Street Journal, “We Watched Andre Agassi Grow," September 6, 2006
- ↑ Jay Winik, The New York Times, “A Brief History of the Resistance," December 16, 2003; John Dickerson, Time magazine, January 17, 2005.
- ↑ National Endowment for the Humanities Website, http://www.neh.org