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

Roy Cohn, July/August 1988 | Vol. 39, No. 5
Queen Barton, April 1988 | Vol. 39, No. 3
Hard Looks at Hidden History
History For Rent, April 1987 | Vol. 38, No. 3
A biographer who knows it well tours Franklin Roosevelt’s home on the Hudson and finds it was not so much the President’s castle as it was his formidable mother’s.
Have historians underestimated the importance of Roosevelt’s 24-year struggle with the disease that made him a paraplegic?
Mrs. Roosevelt Faces Fear
Vidal’s Lincoln
One day in 1917, five young white musicians from New Orleans composed the very first jazz record ever offered for sale
MATTERS OF FACT