Sean Wilentz

Robert Sean Wilentz (/wɪˈlɛnts/; 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, civic, and political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written several award-winning books and articles, including The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Wilentz was born on February 20, 1951, in New York City. His father, Eli Wilentz, and his uncle Theodore "Ted" Wilentz, owned the Eighth Street Bookshop, a well-known Greenwich Village bookstore. He is of Irish and Jewish ancestry.

Wilentz attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1972 and a second B.A. from Balliol College, Oxford in 1974 on a Kellett Fellowship. One of his mentors at Columbia University was U.S. history scholar James P. Shenton. In 1975 he earned an M.A. from Yale University. In 1980, he received his Ph.D. from Yale under the supervision of David Brion Davis. ^{[citation needed]}

Wilentz's historical scholarship has focused on the importance of class and race during the early national period of the USA, especially in New York City. Wilentz has also co-authored books on nineteenth century religion and working class life in the USA. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (W. W. Norton, 2005) won the Bancroft Prize. In May 2008, he authored The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008.^{[citation needed]}

Columbia University professor Eric Foner, a long-time friend, says Wilentz "has written some of the very best examples of the avant-garde of the 70s and the avant-garde more recently. Back then we were trying to recover a lost past or neglected past. More recently historians have been trying to integrate that vision into a larger vision of American history as a whole."

While a professor at Princeton, Wilentz was the senior thesis advisor to Elena Kagan, a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice.

In 2002, Wilentz criticized then-Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for a speech in which Scalia cited Christian perspectives on the afterlife and the role of government in support of the death penalty. Wilentz accused Scalia of “wishing to abandon the intent of the Constitution’s framers and impose views of government and divinity that no Supreme Court Justice, no matter how conservative, has ever embraced.”

In 2019, Wilentz, along with fellow historians James Oakes, James M. McPherson, Victoria E. Bynum, and Gordon S. Wood, sent a letter to The New York Times, critiquing aspects of the Times’s 1619 Project. Specifically, Wilentz and the other letter writers argued that the Project made inaccurate claims about a desire to protect slavery on the part of the Patriots as a driving force behind the American Revolution. Wilentz later criticized the Trump Administration’s 1776 Commission as the “mirror image” of the 1619 Project and argued that it “reduced history to hero worship.”