Joseph Ellis

About 4 pages (1,246 words)

Joseph Ellis
Joseph ellis 2007.jpg}} \| Joseph Ellis in 2007
Born	1943
Occupation	Professor
Nationality	United States
Genres	History

Joseph John Ellis (1943- ) is a Pulitzer Prize - winning Professor of History on the Ford Foundation at Mount Holyoke College. He is the former dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke and also served as Acting President for part of 1984 while President Elizabeth Topham Kennan was on leave.

1 Background
2 Awards
3 Scholarship
- 3.1 Reviews
4 Controversies
- 4.1 Jefferson and Hemings
- 4.2 Vietnam war
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

Background

He received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1969. He served in the United States Army and also taught at West Point until 1972 when he joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke.

Awards

2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation ^[1]
1997 National Book Award winner for American Sphinx:The Character of Thomas Jefferson.

Scholarship

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, 2007 ^[2]
His Excellency: George Washington, 2004.
After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture, 2002.
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, 2000.
What Did the Declaration Declare? (Historians at Work), 1999.
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, 1996.
Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, 1993.
School for soldiers: West Point and the profession of arms, 1974.
The New England mind in transition;: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696-1772, 1973.

Reviews

Reviewers generally praise Ellis's writing for being both insightful and accessible.

Brent Staples, The New York Times Book Review, commented:

Joseph J. Ellis's American Sphinx is a brief and elegant return to Monticello. Mr. Ellis...is a remarkably clear writer, mercifully free of both the groveling and the spirit of attack that have dominated the subject in the past....American Sphinx is fresh and uncluttered but rich in historical context ^[3].

Joyce Appleby, Washington Post Book World commented:

In lesser hands the fractious disputes and hysterical rhetoric of these contentious nation-builders might come across as hyperbolic pettiness. Ellis knows better, and he unpacks the real issues for his readers, revealing the driving assumptions and riveting fears that animated Americans' first encounter with the organized ideologies and interests we call parties ^[4].

Gordon S. Wood, The New Republic commented:

Everyone keeps wondering why over the past decade or so there have been so many books on the Founders, that remarkable generation of men who led the American Revolution and framed the Constitution. Joseph J. Ellis is surely one of the explanations: he has been a one-man historical machine...Ellis has entered the ranks of that tiny group of popular historians, including David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, and Ron Chernow, who sell copies of their books in the tens and even hundreds of thousands ^[5].

Controversies

Jefferson and Hemings

Main Article: American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, became the subject of controversy in 1996. In this text, Ellis suggests that evidence for an affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is "inconclusive".^[6] Specifically, Ellis states in the appendix to American Sphinx,

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.^[7]

Dr. Eugene Foster published an article in the November 5, 1998 issue of the weekly journal, Nature, called "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child." In the article, Foster states that DNA testing proved that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally's son, Eston.^[8] On November 2, 1998, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer ran a feature on this topic, stating that, "according to an article in an upcoming issue of the journal Nature, DNA analysis shows that Jefferson almost certainly fathered at least one of Sally Hemings' children, her last son, Eston."^[9] Ellis, who was interviewed during this broadcast, stated that he had revised his opinion due to this new evidence:

It's not so much a change of heart, but this is really new evidence. And it - prior to this evidence, I think it was a very difficult case to know and circumstantial on both sides, and, in part, because I got it wrong, I think I want to step forward and say this new evidence constitutes, well, evidence beyond any reasonable doubt that Jefferson had a longstanding sexual relationship with Sally Hemings.^[10]

Vietnam war

Ellis became the subject of controversy when the Boston Globe published an article on June 18, 2001, revealing that he had exaggerated his involvement in the Vietnam War (he served in uniform in America but did not go to Vietnam as he had claimed to students and to the media). Ellis acknowledged the mistake in the June 19, 2001 issue of the Boston Globe and in August issued a public apology. ^[11] Mount Holyoke suspended him from both his endowed chair (until further review) as well as from teaching during the 2001-2002 academic year. ^[12] Ellis's scholarship underwent peer review after the Boston Globe article was published as "one of the effects of the scandal was to turn microscopic attention on all [of Ellis's] books and none of these examinations turned up errors or misstatements." ^[13] Mount Holyoke restored his chair in May 2005. ^[14]