Джеффри Чемпион Уорд: Американский историк и писатель

American writer and historian

Geoffrey Champion Ward (born 1940) is an American editor, author, historian and writer of scripts for American history documentaries for public television. He is the author or co author of 19 books, including 10 companion books to the documentaries he has written. He is the winner of seven Emmy Awards.

Ward was born in Newark, Ohio, and is a graduate of Oberlin College (1962), where he majored in art. He had initially planned to be a painter. Ward spent some of his boyhood years in India.

Ward was the founding editor of Audience Magazine (1970–1973) and the editor of American Heritage Magazine (1977–1982). His 1989 biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, A First class Temperament: the Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Ward has been a long time collaborator of American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. Ward describes being asked to write the script for Huey Long after meeting Burns at his house in Walpole, New Hampshire. His script for the documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, won the Writers Guild of America Award in 2005, and the accompanying book won the 2006 William Hill Sports Book of the Year and the Anisfield Wolf Award for best biography. In 2006, the Organization of American Historians gave Ward their Friend of History Award for his outstanding contributions to American history: Over the last twenty years Geoffrey Ward's writings on American History have had a greater influence and reached a wider audience than those of any other American writer and historian. [His] work is always his own, but he has also helped free ideas that otherwise might have been imprisoned in the academy and helped them find a wider world. He has helped academic historians understand the possibilities, limits, and demands of what has become the medium through which most Americans now get their history." The 2011 Burns/Ward collaboration, Prohibition, brought Ward his seventh Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming. Since that project, he worked with Ken Burns on The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, a seven part documentary miniseries depicting the lives of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt, (broadcast on PBS in September 2014), and a multi part TV series "The Vietnam War", with Lynn Novick and Ken Burns (broadcast on PBS in September 2017). In 2012, Ward published a biography of his great grandfather Ferdinand Ward (1851–1925), known as the greatest swindler of the Gilded Age. A Disposition to be Rich was written with the assistance of private family materials.

Ward spent some of his boyhood years in India and has remained involved with India and in Indian issues. Working and writing about the ongoing struggle to save the Bengal tiger in the wild has meant friendships with great tiger men like Fateh Singh Rathore and Billy Arjan Singh. His essays and pieces on India have appeared in a wide array of publications, including Geo, Audubon, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Aperture and others. In 2011, he wrote an introduction for the book Varanasi: Portrait of a Civilization, (Collins, India,) by the photographer Raghu Rai, with whom he has collaborated on magazine pieces. He is currently at work on a book about the partition of the Indian subcontinent.

Ward is involved in the world of jazz and has collaborated with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. After the documentary Jazz was aired on public television, in an interview in the New York Times, Ward spoke of playing West End Blues by Louis Armstrong, as a 15 year old student, so often that the bartender in the Paris cafe across the street from his student housing called him 'Satchmo': "I must have played it a thousand times," he remembered. "I think jazz music is so important to this country I find these characters, Armstrong, Ellington, working in a Jim Crow world, genuinely heroic.""