约瑟夫·埃利斯

约瑟夫·埃利斯（英语：Joseph Ellis ，1943年7月18日—）出生于美国华盛顿特区，是研究美国早期历史的专家，他的书籍《美国的狮身人面像：托马斯·杰弗逊的性格》和《那一代：可敬的开国元勋》分别荣获美国国家图书奖和美国普利策历史奖。

读书生涯

埃利斯在威廉与玛丽学院 毕业，1969年他在耶鲁大学获得了文学硕士和博士学位。

1972年，他在西点军校担任美国队长并且任教两年。

1974年，他在马萨诸塞州大学担任教师，在1979年他被任命全职教授。同时他是福特基金会的教授，他的工作集中在研究美国的开国元勋，其中包括约翰·亚当斯，托马斯·杰斐逊，乔治·华盛顿等人。

作品

《美国的狮身人面像：托马斯·杰弗逊的性格》（ Thomas Jefferson）

《那一代：可敬的开国元勋》

《华盛顿传》

奖项

2001年，其作品《那一代：可敬的开国元勋》荣获美国普利策历史奖。

1997年，其作品《美国的狮身人面像：托马斯·杰弗逊的性格》（ Thomas Jefferson）荣获美国国家图书奖。

Joseph John-Michael Ellis III (born July 18, 1943) is an American historian whose work focuses on the lives and times of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson won a National Book Award in 1997 and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History. Both books were bestsellers.

Early life and education

Ellis was born in Alexandria, Virginia, on July 18, 1943. He received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary, where he was initiated into Theta Delta Chi. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1969, where Edmund S. Morgan directed his dissertation on a colonial American theologian. At William and Mary, Ellis was in ROTC.

Career

Ellis entered the United States Army in August 1969 and spent three years teaching history at the United States Military Academy at West Point before being discharged as a captain in 1972. Ellis later joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College. In 1979, he was made full professor and later became the Ford Foundation Professor of History. He has also taught at Williams College and in the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts. His scholarly work has concentrated on the Founding Fathers of the United States, including biographies of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, the American Revolution, and the history of the Federalist Era, which lasted from 1788 to 1800.

Ellis served as dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts from 1980 to 1990; following that, he was named by the trustees to the endowed Ford Foundation Chair in history. For part of 1984, he also served as the college's acting president while president Elizabeth Topham Kennan was on leave. Ellis was suspended without pay in 2001 after falsely telling his students that he had fought in the Vietnam War; he was reappointed to the chair four years later, in 2005. Ellis retired from Mount Holyoke in 2012.

Presidential biographies

Together with histories of the founding of the republic, since 1993 Ellis has written biographies about individual early presidents and, in 2010, a joint biography of John and Abigail Adams. Interested in how men shaped and were shaped by their times, he writes with a novelist's emphasis on character. Ellis is notable as a respected scholar whose work has also gained popular success; his biography of Jefferson and work on the Founding Fathers have been bestsellers, attaining sales of hundreds of thousands of copies. In 2004, the critic Jonathan Yardley wrote of him: "Ellis doubtless is now the most widely read scholar of the Revolutionary period, and thus probably the most influential as well—at least among the general public..."

John Adams

As a result of his research, Ellis believed that John Adams was underappreciated as the nation's second president; he worked to reveal the man's contributions and character. His book, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, led to a revival of interest in Adams and new appreciation for his achievements.

Thomas Jefferson

In his book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996), Ellis explored the character and personality of Jefferson, and his many contradictions. He emphasized how important privacy was to him, and how the president and statesman preferred to work behind the scenes in politics, through letters, meetings and discussions over dinners. Ellis noted Jefferson's success in this style.

In relation to one of the major questions about his private life, whether Jefferson had a liaison with his slave Sally Hemings, Ellis suggested that evidence was "inconclusive." His deep analysis of Jefferson's character led him to conclude that the statesman did not have the liaison. Specifically, Ellis says in the appendix to American Sphinx: