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 classic work April 1865: The Month That Saved America.

Winik is an honors graduate of Yale College. He also holds an M.Sc.(Econ) 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 Cambodia's civil war. In 1991, he took up writing history full-time.

The Baltimore Sun has called Winik “one of the nation's leading public historians” and he is currently the inaugural Historian-in-Residence at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of the well-regarded 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 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 best-seller.

Winik has been read by political leaders including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell. Winik appears on page 1 of Bush's presidential memoir, Decision Points, discussing the craft of writing history with the president.

Winik's articles and history book reviews have been published in the New York Times, Time magazine, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. 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 Donald Trump and Barack Obama's 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 essay, 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.

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, The 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 is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

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• April 1865: The Month That Saved America, G.K. Hall, 2001, ISBN 9780783895819;  
• 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History, Simon & Schuster, 2015, ISBN 9781439114087