Sean Wilentz

Robert Sean Wilentz (; born February 20, 1951) is an American historian who serves as the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His primary research interests include U.S. social, civic, and political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written several award-winning books and articles, including ''The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln'', which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Early life and education

Wilentz was born on February 20, 1951, in New York City. His father, Eli Wilentz, and his uncle Theodore "Ted" Wilentz, owned the Eighth Street Bookshop, a well-known Greenwich Village bookstore. He is of Irish and Jewish ancestry.

Wilentz attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1972 and a second B.A. from Balliol College, Oxford in 1974 on a Kellett Fellowship. One of his mentors at Columbia University was U.S. history scholar James P. Shenton. In 1975 he earned an M.A. from Yale University. In 1980, he received his Ph.D. from Yale under the supervision of David Brion Davis.

Career

Scholarship

Wilentz's historical scholarship has focused on the importance of class and race during the early national period of the USA, especially in New York City. Wilentz has also co-authored books on nineteenth century religion and working class life in the USA. ''The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln'' (W. W. Norton, 2005) won the Bancroft Prize. His goal was to revive the reputation of Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian democracy, which was under attack from the left because of Jackson's support for slavery, pursuit of escaped slaves, and his harshness toward Native Americans, including his forced removals of Indian populations from land confiscated by populations of European ancestry. Wilentz returned to the pro-Jackson themes of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who in 1946 hailed the pro-labor policies of Jacksonians in the urban North. In May 2008, he authored ''The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008''.

Columbia University professor Eric Foner, a long-time friend, says Wilentz "has written some of the very best examples of the avant-garde of the 70s and the avant-garde more recently. Back then we were trying to recover a lost past or neglected past. More recently historians have been trying to integrate that vision into a larger vision of American history as a whole."

While a professor at Princeton, Wilentz was the senior thesis advisor to Elena Kagan, an U.S. Supreme Court associate justice.

Music

As a contributing editor at ''The New Republic'', Wilentz has published essays about music, the arts, history, and politics. He received a Grammy Award nomination and a 2005 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for the liner notes Wilentz contributed to the album '' The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall''.

In 2010, Wilentz published ''Bob Dylan In America'', which placed Dylan in the context of American twentieth century history and culture. The book includes essays on Dylan's relationship with Aaron Copland, Allen Ginsberg, and the Beat generation, and the recording of '' Blonde on Blonde''.

Politics

Wilentz has prominently engaged in current political debate. He is a long-time family friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and has been a staunch public defender of the Clintons. On December 8, 1998, he appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to argue against the Clinton impeachment. He told House members that, if they voted for impeachment, but were not convinced Clinton's offenses were impeachable, "...history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness". His testimony cheered Democratic partisans, but was criticized by ''The New York Times'', which lamented his "gratuitously patronizing presentation" in an editorial.

In 2006, he wrote an article in ''Rolling Stone'' denouncing the George W. Bush presidency as "The Worst President in History?" In response, ''National Review'' attacked Wilentz's analysis as "blinkered", calling him "the modern Arthur Schlesinger Jr".

Wilentz followed up during the 2008 election with another article in ''Rolling Stone'', describing how the failures of the Bush administration had caused a "political meltdown" of the Republican Party, with potentially enormous long-term effects. In the wake of the October, 2013 federal government shutdown, he authored another article in ''Rolling Stone'' on what he called a "crisis" within the Republican Party, claiming the party was gradually descending into extremism.

In 2008, Wilentz was an outspoken supporter of then U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president. He wrote an essay in ''The New Republic'' analyzing U.S. Senator Barack Obama's campaign, charging Obama with creating "manipulative illusion and "distortions," and having "purposefully polluted the rimary electoralcontest" with "the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988". During the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Wilentz charged in ''Newsweek'' that " liberal intellectuals have largely abdicated their responsibility to provide unblinking and rigorous analysis" of Obama. "Hardly any prominent liberal thinkers" have questioned his "rationalizations" about his relationship to his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., or "his patently evasive accounts" of his "ties" to the "unrepentant terrorist William Ayers". For Wilentz, Obama was untested, cloudy, and problematic, with liberal intellectuals giving him a free ride. Wilentz was criticized by bloggers and others for his criticism of Obama.

In January 2014, Wilentz took issue with those involved in the 2013 NSA leaks, including those related to Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange. In Wilentz's view, "the value of some of their revelations does not mean that they deserve the prestige and influence that has been accorded to them. The leakers and their supporters would never hand the state modern surveillance powers, even if they came wrapped in all sorts of rules and regulations that would constrain their abuse. They are right to worry, but wrong – even paranoid – to distrust democratic governments in this way. Surveillance and secrecy will never be attractive features of a democratic government, but they are not inimical to it, either. This the leakers will never understand."

In October 2020, Wilentz called U.S. President Donald Trump "the worst president in American history" for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and political polarization of the country. He further wrote that Trump and Attorney General William Barr had created the greatest "existential crisis for American democracy" since the American Civil War through their alleged politicization of the U.S. Department of Justice and attempted delegitimization of the 2020 presidential election, comparing Trump's ideology to the Confederacy and calling it "a bacillus of racism and authoritarianism". He also claimed Barr was advancing "an Americanized version of something more akin to Generalissimo Francisco Franco's Spain" and "a theocracy, overseen by a president who more closely resembles an elected monarch". After the 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, Wilentz predicted that if Trump and the Republican Party returned to power in the 2022 and 2024 elections, they would legally establish "a more or less ironclad system of undemocratic minority rule" to permanently block liberal policies and end majority democracy, calling them "right-wing Bolsheviks". He compared Trump to John C. Calhoun and Richard Nixon.

Civics

During his interview by Julian Zelizer on the May 9, 2025 edition of "The Long View", Wilentz discussed whether President Andrew Jackson ever defied the Supreme Court of the United States of America as that is claimed by supporters of Trump in order to justify actions by Trump and his administration since his second inauguration in 2025. Wilentz corrected the frequent misquote attributed to Jackson regarding the court, provided the documented history of related aspects of the Jackson presidency, and discussed how strongly Jackson supported the rule of law. He also enumerated the articles of the Constitution of the United States of America that are being violated by Trump and his administration.

Personal life

Wilentz lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Caroline Cleaves and their children. He has two children from his first marriage, to the historian Christine Stansell.

Wilentz is a Princeton Athletics Fellow for the Princeton Tigers baseball team.

Awards

* 1984 Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association for ''Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850''
* 2006 Bancroft Prize for ''The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln''

Bibliography

Books

* ''Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850'', 1984.
* Merrill, Michael, and Sean Wilentz, eds. ''The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, "A Laborer," 1747–1814'', 1993.
* ''The Kingdom of Matthias'', 1994 (co-authored with Paul E. Johnson).
* ''Andrew Jackson'', 2005.
* ''The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln'', 2005.
* ''Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad'', Wilentz, Sean and Greil Marcus, eds., 2005.
* ''Major Problems in the Early Republic'', Wilentz, Sean, and Jonathan Earle, eds., 1992; 2nd ed. 2007.
* ''The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008'', 2008.
* "Abraham Lincoln and Jacksonian Democracy", in Foner, Eric, ed. ''Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World'', 2008.
* ''The Best American History Essays on Lincoln'', Wilentz, Sean, ed., 2009.
* ''Bob Dylan in America'', New York: Doubleday, 2010.
* "President Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle for Equality", in Isaacson, Walter, ed., ''Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness'', W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
* "Democracy at Gettysburg", in Conant, Sean, ed. ''The Gettysburg Address: Perspectives on Lincoln's Greatest Speech'', Oxford University Press, 2015.
* ''The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics,'' W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.
* ''No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding'', Harvard University Press, 2018.
* "Introduction" by Sean Wilentz to '' Fred W. McDarrah: New York Scenes'', Abrams Books, 2018.

Academic papers

* ''On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America'', ''Reviews in American History'', Vol. 10, No. 4, The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects (Dec., 1982), pp. 45–63
* "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790–1920," ''International Labor and Working Class History,'' 26 (Fall 1984): 1–24,

Articles

* "The Sedition of Donald Trump", ''Rolling Stone Magazine'', October 11, 2020,
*

Book reviews

Critical studies and reviews

;''The Age of Reagan: a history, 1974–2008''
* John Ehrmanbr>, "There He Goes Again: A review of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008, Sean Wilentz" ''The Claremont Institute'' (2008)
review by conservative scholar
;''The rise of American democracy : Jackson to Lincoln''
* Altschuler, Glenn C., "Democracy as a Work in Progress", ''Reviews in American History'', Volume 34, Number 2, June 2006, pp. 169–17

review of ''The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln''

References

External links

Wilentz interview from 2005

Wilentz interview NPR 2010
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C-SPAN ''Q&A'' interview with Wilentz, May 7, 2006

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilentz, Sean
1951 births
Living people
21st-century American historians
21st-century American male writers
American male non-fiction writers
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
Bancroft Prize winners
The New York Review of Books people
American writers about music
Columbia College (New York) alumni
Princeton University faculty
Yale University alumni
Midwood High School alumni
American people of Irish descent
American people of Jewish descent