Jay Winik

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

Jay Winik
Born (1957-02-08) February 8, 1957
New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
OccupationWriter and historian
NationalityAmerican
Alma materYale College

London School of Economics

Yale University
Notable worksApril 1865, The Great Upheaval, 1944

Education and early career

Winik is an honors graduate of Yale College. He also holds an M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics with distinction and a Ph.D. from Yale University. He played on the Yale tennis team and was an editor of the Yale Daily News.[1]

He had a brief career in the U.S. government's foreign policy, involving civil wars around the globe, from the former Yugoslavia to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Cambodia, including helping to create the United Nations plan to end the Cambodian Civil War. In 1991, he took up writing history full-time.[2]

Career

The Baltimore Sun has called Winik “one of the nation's leading public historians” and he is currently the inaugural Historian-in-Residence at the Council on Foreign Relations.[3] He is the author of the highly acclaimed, number one bestseller April 1865 (2001), which also became a History Channel documentary and a stage production, both of which feature him.[4] In 2007 Winik published the New York Times' bestselling 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 NYT best-seller.[6] It has stimulated a broad national conversation about morality and foreign policy.

Winik has been read by political leaders including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Harry Reid, and Mitch McConnell as well as Chief Justice John Roberts and numerous celebrities.[7] Winik appears on the first page of George W. Bush's presidential memoir Decision Points, discussing the craft of writing history with the president. Just after the September 11 attacks, Bush was seen carrying April 1865 in the White House.[8]

In 2017 in the New York Times, renowned actor Tom Hanks read an excerpt from April 1865 to Maureen Dowd about slavery and race relations.[9] He told the NYT that Winik's April 1865 is on his nightstand.[10] Peggy Noonan also told the NYT that 1944 is on her nightstand.[11]

Articles and commentary

Winik's articles and history book reviews have been published in the New York Times, Atlantic magazine, Time magazine, Newsweek, National Review, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, to which he has been a frequent contributor.[12] He has appeared on national broadcasts such 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 historical commentary for documentaries on the History Channel and PBS as well as C-SPAN, and was the Presidential Historian for FOX News for Donald Trump and Barack Obama's inaugurations and Senator Ted Kennedy's funeral.

In 2002 he was a regular on the History Channel weekly show, The History Center. 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, 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.[13]

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.[14] He also currently serves on the board of trustees for The American Folk Life Center[15] of the Library of Congress, as well as the Veterans History Project[16] of the Library of Congress.

Memberships

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians. Appointed by the President, he is on the board of trustees of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Works
External video
Presentation by Winik on April 1865, April 12, 2001, C-SPAN
Booknotes interview with Winik on April 1865, July 29, 2001, C-SPAN
Washington Journal interview with Winik on The Great Upheaval, September 14, 2007, C-SPAN
Presentation by Winik on 1944, September 5, 2015, C-SPAN
  • 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
  1. April 1865, HarperCollins, 2006, P.S. Section
  2. The Great Upheaval, HarperCollins, 2008, P.S. Section
  3. Baltimore Sun, 10-14-2007
  4. Biography of Winik at http://jaywinik.com
  5. Amazon.com, The Great Upheaval, reviews section; Gordon Wood, The New York Review of Books, November 8, 2007
  6. "1944". simonandschuster.com. Retrieved 3 March 2015.
  7. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, December 25, 2008; The Washington Post, Reliable Source, September 28, 2007
  8. Dickerson, John F. (January 10, 2005). "What the president reads". www.cnn.com. Retrieved 2017-11-15.
  9. Dowd, Maureen (2017-10-11). "Hollywood's Most Decent Fella on Weinstein, Trump and History". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-11-15.
  10. "Tom Hanks: By the Book". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-11-15.
  11. "Peggy Noonan: By the Book". The New York Times. 2015-12-17. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-11-15.
  12. Jay Winik, The Wall Street Journal, “We Watched Andre Agassi Grow," September 6, 2006
  13. Jay Winik, The New York Times, "A Brief History of the Resistance", December 16, 2003; John Dickerson, Time magazine, January 17, 2005.
  14. National Endowment for the Humanities Website, http://www.neh.org
  15. American Folk Life Center Website, https://www.loc.gov/folklife/
  16. Veterans History Project Website, https://www.loc.gov/vets/
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