Robert M.S. McDonald

Robert M. S. McDonald is Professor of History at the United States Military Academy, where he has taught since 1998. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his Ph.D. A specialist on Thomas Jefferson and the early American republic, he is the author of Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time (2016) and editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West Point (2004), Light & Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge (2012), and Sons of the Father: George Washington and His Protégés (2013). He is preparing for publication an edited volume to be titled Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History as well as a volume in Ashbrook’s Core Documents collection on the American Revolution. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife, Christine, and their children Jefferson and Grace.