Joseph John-Michael Ellis III was born on July 18,1943 and is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian whose work focuses on the lives and times of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
18 Facts About Joseph Ellis
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Joseph Ellis has taught at Williams College and in the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts.
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Joseph Ellis served as dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts ; following that, he was named by the trustees to the endowed Ford Foundation Chair in history.
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Joseph 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.
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Together with histories of the founding of the republic, since 1993 Joseph Ellis has written biographies about individual early presidents and, in 2010, a joint biography of John and Abigail Adams.
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Joseph Ellis is notable as a respected scholar whose work has gained popular success; his biography of Jefferson and work on the Founding Fathers have been bestsellers, attaining sales of hundreds of thousands of copies.
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Joseph Ellis 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.
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In interviews on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in November 1998 and Frontline's Jefferson's Blood in 2000, Joseph Ellis made public statements about his change of opinion following the DNA studies, saying he believed that Jefferson had a long-term relationship with Sally Hemings.
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Joseph Ellis described how Washington's experiences in earlier leadership contributed to his actions and development as president.
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Joseph Ellis wrote that "we do not need another epic [Washington biography], but rather a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington's character", which the critic Jonathan Yardley said he had achieved.
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In June 2001, the Boston Globe revealed that Joseph Ellis had misled his students in lectures and the media about his role in the Vietnam War years.
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Joseph Ellis falsely claimed that he had been involved in protests in the civil rights movement and anti-war movement in the 1960s.
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Joseph Ellis repeatedly claimed to have fought in the Vietnam War.
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In one of his lectures, Joseph Ellis stated that he had been involved in helping to clear an area near My Lai shortly before a well-known massacre was carried out in the village.
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Joseph Ellis cited rumors at Mount Holyoke campus that he had served in Vietnam but would not talk about it because of some disturbing experience as something that led him to fabricate claims of service.
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Joseph Ellis said that he had felt guilty about not actually serving in Vietnam.
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Joseph Ellis returned to the classroom at the end of that time.
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However, Joseph Ellis was prohibited from again teaching his course on the 1960s, during which most of his fabrications were made.