Sean Wilentz

Robert Sean Wilentz (wᵻˈlɛnts; born February 20, 1951) is an American historian who serves as the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His primary research interests include U.S. social and political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written numerous award-winning books and articles including, most notably, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wilentz was born on February 20, 1951, in New York City, where his father, Eli Wilentz, and uncle Theodore "Ted" Wilentz, owned a well-known Greenwich Village bookstore, the Eighth Street Bookshop. He is of Jewish and Irish ancestry. Wilentz attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn, New York, and earned one B.A. at Columbia University in 1972, before earning another at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1974 on a Kellett Fellowship. One of his mentors at Columbia was scholar of US history James P. Shenton. In 1975 he earned an M.A. at Yale University and in 1980 received his Ph.D., also from Yale, under David Brion Davis's supervision. Wilentz's historical scholarship has focused on the importance of class and race in the early national period, especially in New York City. Wilentz has also co-authored books on nineteenth-century religion and working-class life. His highly detailed The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (W. W. Norton, 2005) won the Bancroft Prize. His goal was to revive the reputation of Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian democracy, which was under attack from the left because of Jackson's support for slavery and pursuit of escaped slaves, and especially his harshness toward Native Americans, including his forced removals of Indian populations from land confiscated by European-ancestry populations. Wilentz returned to the pro-Jackson themes of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who in 1946 had hailed the pro-labor policies of Northern, urban Jacksonians.