On Friday, September 26th, Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation and parent of Alex Ellis ’10, visited campus to speak to U.S. History students about the establishment of the United States under the Constitution. His lecture focused on the triumphs and tragedies of the American Revolution and touched upon material found in Founding Brothers, which was mandatory summer reading for AP U.S. History students.
Prior to the lecture, a handful of selected U.S. History students had the opportunity to dine with Mr. Ellis and his wife Ellen in the Sally Hart Lodge. The dinner conversation, led largely by Mr. Ellis, centered on both current political topics and historical events covered in classes and his book. Mr. Ellis entertained all with his historical tales, informed political opinions, and an occasional jab at Sarah Palin.
Joseph Ellis’s presentation to the students analyzed the foundation of America in terms of what succeeded and what failed. He started from 1776, a year he describes as the year of the “big bang” of the political universe. Though many triumphs were listed—America was the first nation to declare total separation of the church and state and the first to have a two-party political system—the early history of the United States included devastating tragedies. Mr. Ellis cited the failure to end slavery and the genocide of Native Americans as huge mistakes by American leaders. These mistakes eventually led to the bloodiest war in U.S. History, the Civil War, which was essentially a continuation of the American Revolution.
Mr. Ellis, a professor at Mt. Holyoke University, has written nine books. His book titled American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson won the 1997 National Book Award. His method of researching for all of his books is “old-fashioned” by his own description. “I focus on primary material—letters and documents that relate to life. I like reading with my own eyes, seeing if I can find things there that others haven’t found… the act of writing history is the only creative act I’m capable of.” In his work, he strives to look at historical events as a “grand narrative,” attempting to “see in the point of view of people at that time, though not to tell the story exclusively from there.”
To students writing their own analysis of any historical event, Mr. Ellis has simple advice: “Tell a story. Think of yourself as a novelist who’s on a leash. You want to be able to write as a novelist, but you want to have that leash tie you to the evidence.”
Joe Ellis gets emotional about the foundations of the US Constitution. PHOTO/Michael tsai ‘10
