In this follow-up to his bestselling Founding Brothers, Ellis offers a magisterial account of the life and times of George Washington, celebrating the heroic image of the president whom peers like Jefferson and Madison recognized as 'their unquestioned superior' while acknowledging his all-too-human qualities. His Excellency is a magnificent work, indispensable to an understanding not only of its subject but also of the nation he brought into being. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet. Here is the free-spending landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power. Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a military and political leader and a man whose “statue-like solidity” concealed volcanic energies and emotions. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. His deepest concerns are the education of his daughter and the future of the Great Plains.To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Clay has written nine books, including the critically acclaimed The Character of Meriwether Lewis.Ĭlay lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, where he is a distinguished scholar of the humanities at Bismarck State College and the founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. He has made four documentary films himself. He has appeared in three Ken Burns documentary films, including the most recent film The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Robert Oppenheimer, and John Wesley Powell. He has portrayed a dozen historical characters, including Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Meriwether Lewis, J. He has been named Humanities Scholar of the Year in Kansas, Nevada, and North Dakota.Ĭlay was one of the creators of the modern Chautauqua movement.

All of his degrees are in Renaissance English literature.Ĭlay has won numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal, the highest honor conferred on a public humanities scholar in the United States. He attended the University of Minnesota, Oxford University, and the University of Colorado. Clay Jenkinson grew up on the western plains of North Dakota, not far from Theodore Roosevelt’s badlands.

His excellency joseph ellis