About

Sean Wilentz was born and raised in New York City. His family owned the famed 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, where as a boy and young teenager he was immersed in the currents of beat literature and folk singing that would profoundly change the nation’s culture — and the world’s. (Allen Ginsberg first met Bob Dylan in his uncle’s apartment above the shop, a fateful encounter in the lives and writing of both artists.) It is out of this formative experience that Wilentz writes about the music and literature of that time and its legacies. But he also became deeply interested early on in American history, beginning with family trips to sites in and around the city connected with the American Revolution. Those interests in time carried him through his undergraduate studies at Columbia College and Balliol College, Oxford, then through his graduate studies at Yale, to his career as a professional historian.

Wilentz’s historical scholarship has concentrated on the political and social history of the United States from the Revolution to recent times. His best-known book, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), received the Bancroft Prize among other honors, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. More recently, his book No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (2018) was awarded the Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize by the Georgetown Center for the Constitution at the Georgetown University Law School. His other works include Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984; reissued with a new preface, 2004), winner of, among other distinctions, the Albert J. Beveridge Award and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award; The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics (2016); The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century America (with Paul E. Johnson, 1994); The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (2008); and The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747- 1814 (with Michael Merrill, 1993).

He is currently completing The Fall of American Slavery, a comprehensive history of the multiform antislavery crusade, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and concluding with the ratification of the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery in 1865. A counterpart to the Rise of American Democracy, the book will complete Wilentz’s account of the two great revolutions, anti-monarchical and antislavery, that first cohered in the American colonies and early republic and transformed the Atlantic world.   

Wilentz’s highly successful textbook, Major Problems in the Early Republic, 1787-1848, originally published in 1992, appeared in a second edition in 2007, co-edited with Jonathan H. Earle. Wilentz has also edited collections of essays on Abraham Lincoln and on political ritual and symbolism, a modern edition of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World; and, for the Library of America, the first of a projected three volumes of the works of the historian Richard Hofstadter.

Wilentz serves as general editor of the acclaimed American Presidents’ series for Henry Holt, and the James Madison Library in American Politics for Princeton University Press. A former contributing editor at The New Republic and at Newsweek, he is a member of the editorial boards of Dissent and Democracy Journal. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, his work has also appeared in numerous other national and international publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Op-Ed page, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. He has appeared on numerous network television and radio programs, including “Morning Joe,” “Fresh Air”, “Radio Times,” and NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

Wilentz has brought his historical expertise to bear at the highest levels of the federal government. In 1998, he joined with his colleagues Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and C. Vann Woodward to form Historians in Defense of the Constitution, an ad hoc organization of several hundred American historians who opposed on constitutional grounds the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. That effort, as well as Wilentz’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in December 1998, proved controversial but also effective. The late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, among others close to the proceedings, later cited the historians’ arguments as one of the crucial factors that consolidated the Senate’s bipartisan rejection of the House Republicans’ effort to drive the president from office. More recently, Wilentz joined a small group of historians which on two occasions met with President Joseph R, Biden to discuss the vulnerabilities, past and present, of American democracy.

Wilentz’s writings on music have focused on folk traditions and contemporary rock and roll, especially the work of Bob Dylan. His liner notes for Dylan’s album, The Bootleg Series, Volume 6, Bob Dylan Live, 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall were honored with a Grammy® nomination and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for musical commentary. He has written liner notes for other notable reissues, including the full Carnegie Hall concert of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, recorded in 1963. He received a second Grammy nomination and a second ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his 2013 book 360 Sound: The Columbia Records Story. In 2004, he edited with Greil Marcus a collection of original essays, poems, and visuals entitled The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad. Sony Legacy subsequently released a CD containing recordings tied to the book, and the producer Hal Willner oversaw a live floor show dedicated to the songs, with performances by, among others, Rosanne Cash, Peter Stampfel, and Terre Roche.