Jay Winik

Jay Winik
Born	(1957-02-08) February 8, 1957 New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Occupation	Writer and historian
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale College London School of Economics Yale University
Notable works	April 1865, The Great Upheaval, 1944
Website
jaywinik.com

Jay Winik (born February 8, 1957, in New Haven, Connecticut) is a best-selling author and American historian who is best known for his classic work April 1865: The Month That Saved America.

Education and early career

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]

Writing

The Baltimore Sun has called him “one of the nation's leading public historians,” while he counts among his fans three of the last four presidents of the United States,^[3] as well as a diverse set of readers stretching from Jamie Lee Curtis, the actress, to the Chief Justice of the United States, President Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and baseball superstar Mike Piazza.

He is the author of the New York Times and number one bestseller April 1865 (2001), which received wide international acclaim and is widely regarded as instant classic. It was also turned into a documentary on the History Channel, in which he was a principal commentator. April 1865 later became a sold-out performance for Ford's Theatre in 2008, which Winik wrote and performed in.^[4] April 1865 was even an answer on the popular quiz show, Jeopardy.

In 2007 Winik published the New York Times best-seller 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.” The noted novelist and essayist Christopher Buckley called The Great Upheaval "triumphant " and wrote that Winik is “one of the finest, and most stylish, historians writing,” while the distinguished early American scholar, Gordon S. Wood, has written that Winik is a "superb storyteller."^[5]

Winik's latest book is 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History.^[6]

Winik has been widely read by political leaders. President Bill Clinton, who has given his books as presents, and former Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid and Tom Daschle have read both Winik's books and talked to him about the lessons of history. So did current Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as well as President George W. Bush. At the peak of his popularity following 9/11, the President visibly read Winik's April 1865, prompting new stories about the book around the world; according to the Washington Post, Bush later read his The Great Upheaval.^[7] (8) It has also been reported that the President had a private lunch in the Oval Office to discuss history with Winik. 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

A firm believer in giving back, Winik serves as a trustee or advisory board member on a number of nonprofit boards having to do with his various passions: history, education, and historical preservation, 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, a presidential appointment ratified by the Senate.^[10]

Memberships

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

References