Geoffrey C. Ward

Geoffrey C Ward is an author editor historian and writer of scripts for American History Documentaries for Public Television He is the author or coauthor of 18 books Five books are companion books to documentary films that he has written He has won seven Emmy Awards The principal writer of the television miniseries The Civil War 1990 Ward has collaborated with its coproducer Ken Burns on many of the documentaries he has made since including Jazz Baseball The War and Not For Ourselves Alone The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony This work has garnered him five Emmy Awards He also won two Emmys for the American Experience series including The Kennedys in 1992 and TRThe Story of Theodore Roosevelt in 1996 His script for the documentary Unforgivable Blackness The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson won the Writers Guild of America Award in 20053 and the accompanying book won the 2006 William Hill Sports Book of the Year and the AnisfieldWolf 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 Wards 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 most recent BurnsWard collaboration Prohibition 2011 brought Ward his seventh Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming He is currently at work on a multipart series Vietnam with Lynn Novick and Ken Burns He is the principle writer or cowriter of 24 documentary films Ward is married to the writer and socialenvironmental activist Diane Raines Ward He has three children