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''.

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''.

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.

Career

The ''Baltimore Sun'' has called Winik “one of the nation's leading public historians” and he is currently th
inaugural Historian-in-Residence
at the Council on Foreign Relations. 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. 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.” Winik's latest book is ''1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History'', also a ''NYT'' best-seller. 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. 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.

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. He told the ''NYT'' that Winik's ''April 1865'' is on his nightstand. Peggy Noonan also told the ''NYT'' that ''1944'' is on her nightstand.

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. 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 Barack Obama's and Donald Trump's 2017 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.

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, and its 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. He also currently serves on the board of trustees for The American Folk Life Center of the Library of Congress, as well as the Veterans History Project 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

*
*''April 1865: The Month That Saved America'', G.K. Hall, 2001, ;
*''1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History'', Simon & Schuster, 2015, .
*''1861: The Lost Peace'', Grand Central Publishing, 2025, .

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Winik, Jay
Living people
1957 births
20th-century American historians
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
Writers from New Haven, Connecticut
Yale College alumni
Alumni of the London School of Economics
20th-century American male writers
American male non-fiction writers
Historians from Connecticut