Prof. Robert S. McDonald

Robert M. S. McDonald is a professor of history at the United States Military Academy and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute. 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 author of Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time (University of Virginia Press, 2016). In addition to essays and articles in journals such as The Historian, Southern Cultures, and the Journal of the Early Republic, he is editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West Point (University of Virginia Press, 2004), Light & Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge (University of Virginia Press, 2012), and Sons of the Father: George Washington and His Protégés (University of Virginia Press, 2013). He is completing an edited volume to be titled Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife, Christine, and their children Jefferson and Grace.