Jon Meacham
Presidential historian and Pulitzer-prize winning author; Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University; co-chair of the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy
Jon Meacham holds the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, where he co-chairs the Vanderbilt Project on Unity & Democracy. A Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, bestselling author, and Canon Historian of Washington National Cathedral, Meacham lectures widely on history, politics, and religious faith.
Meacham is the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers, including His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, The Hope of Glory: Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation (with Tim McGraw), Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, and Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship.
His biography American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2009. Meacham’s 2022 book, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won multiple awards. He is also the editor of Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement and In the Hands of the People, an anthology of Thomas Jefferson’s writings. A former executive editor at Random House and editor at Newsweek, Meacham has also contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and Vanity Fair.
Meacham has served on numerous boards, including the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the New-York Historical Society. He also chaired the National Advisory Council of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University and has served on the vestries of St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue and Trinity Church Wall Street. He is a former member of the Board of Trustees for The Harpeth Hall School.
In 2005, the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University granted Meacham with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree. In 2016, he was honored with the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute’s Spirit of Democracy Award. In 2021, the National Archives awarded Meacham its Records of Achievement Award.
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jon Meacham was educated at St. Nicholas School, The McCallie School, and graduated in 1991 from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a degree summa cum laude in English Literature; he was salutatorian and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He lives in Nashville and Sewanee with his wife and children.