Skip to main content

Geoffrey C. Ward

A former editor of AMERICAN HERITAGE, Geoffrey Ward is an author and screenwriter of various documentaries on American history. He wrote the television mini-series The Civil War with Ken Burns and has collaborated with Burns on every documentary he has made since, including Jazz and Baseball. This work won him five Emmy Awards. Another Burns/Ward collaboration, The War, premiered on PBS in September 2007. In addition he co-wrote The West, of which Ken Burns was an executive producer, with fellow historian Dayton Duncan. Ward is the author or co-author of eighteen books, including five companion books to the documentaries he has written. A First-Class Temperament, his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1962.

Articles by this Author

Without my crooked ancestor, Grant would never have written his magnificent account of the Civil War.
Henry the Kid, April 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 3
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s honeymoon was a lavish grand tour through a sunny, hospitable Europe. It was also filled with signs of the mutual bafflement that would one day embitter their marriage.
Robeson’s Choice, April 1989 | Vol. 40, No. 3
Clues uncovered during the recent restoration of his house at Springfield help humanize the Lincoln portrait.
America’s Baby, March 1989 | Vol. 40, No. 2