Alan Taylor

Alan Taylor is an American historian and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for History — one of very few historians to have achieved this distinction. His first Pulitzer came for William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995). His second came for The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (2013), which examined how enslaved people in Virginia used the War of 1812 and the proximity of British forces to seek freedom, and won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History. Taylor's other major works include American Colonies (2001), The Civil War of 1812 (2010), and American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 (2021). He is known for writing history that centers enslaved people and Native Americans as historical actors.