Author Q&A

Interview with Jay Winik, Author of The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788-1800

By Michael Causey, WIW Past President

He makes history come alive and inspires other writers in the process. It’s all in a day’s work for author, historian and Silver Spring resident Jay Winik. After winning praise and achieving bestseller listings with his instant classic April 1865, Winik is back with an even more ambitious work: The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788-1800 (Harper).

It’s a sweeping work with an equally bold thesis. The 1788-1800 period is ultimately “the most significant era in all of human history,” one that has not received the broad perspective it requires. Events in far-away nations directly and almost immediately impacted what was happening in other countries, Winik says during a September phone interview.

A senior scholar of history and public policy at the University of Maryland, Winik is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He’s also part advocate for the value of knowing our shared history and part myth-buster. For example, Winik emphatically says that the important figures of the time period – among them, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in America, Louis XVI, Voltaire, and Napoleon in France, and perhaps the era’s most underrated figure, Catherine the Great of Russia – were all watching each other closely and in near real-time as revolutions surged, movements were repressed, and a world grew up.

“It’s a myth that only the contemporary world, driven by email, air travel, cell phones and BlackBerrys, is interconnected,” Winik said. “In truth, the world of the 1790s was stitched together in ways that we can scarcely grasp, from Philadelphia to Paris to St. Petersburg to Constantinople.”

As the 1790s began, America was a fledgling nation without a strong foundation, Russia loomed as a major imperial power, and France was reeling from revolution and unrest. In his new book, Winik makes a strong argument for the era’s unparalleled importance (“this is how the modern world was formed”) – and its uncanny parallels for the world of today.

For example, the historical period recounted in The Great Upheaval documents what Winik calls the first great holy war between the Islamic world and the West. Catherine of Russia, a powerful, charismatic and often visionary leader, sought to destroy the Islamic empire, centered in what is today’s Istanbul. Napoleon would later try to dominate the Muslims in the Middle East, with, as Winik notes, “much the same ghastly results we see today.”

Winik believes these “early savage clashes between Christianity and Islam laid the seeds for the global discord today, from the battles in Iraq to the rebellion in Chechnya.” For Winik, history is trying to help us toward a better future – if we will only listen. “Understanding this powerful but sobering story will help us better comprehend the world’s current turmoil.”

The book, at nearly 600 pages with exhaustive notes and research, became a challenge for Winik. “It’s a never ending process, and for a few years I researched until I felt like I’d read everything fifty times,” he said.  He spent years researching the book, took over 1,000 pages of notes, and then outlined it several times before he put pen to paper. The writing itself is almost a reward that offered exhilaration to Winik when he found his “voice” for the text. Yet he also cautions that a history writer should be worried if they start out in one direction and never change. Instead, you should have “epiphanies” during your research that set you off in different, unexpected directions, he said.

And after all that work, he did a very careful edit that took almost two years. “I edit very carefully,” he says with understatement.

But the whole challenge itself was a big part of what drew Winik to this subject. “I believe a historian has to challenge himself or herself, [and The Great Upheaval] is the first history to weave together a global narrative of this crucial period.”

Another “reward,” in addition to big sales and kudos in reviews, is the reception he gets from readers on tour, Winik says. With April 1865 he had the good fortune to be on The New York Times bestseller list and receive unexpected public praise from a wide range of people, such as Presidents Clinton and Bush, John Edwards, George Lucas, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and even baseball star Mike Piazza.
A big motivator for Winik is a desire to give Americans a “sense of where we came from, learn what leadership is all about, and perhaps provide some lessons for today.”

While he has no idea yet what his next project will be, Winik encourages others to follow their dream of writing a book. His advice: “Believe in yourself, be passionate about your subject….and get an agent!”

Based on the sales of April 1865 and the early reaction to The Great Upheaval, it sounds like Winik is accomplishing his goals.

“I’ve met a lot of wonderful people who love history and ask varied questions….and I learn things from them,” he says. “They set me thinking…especially when I am not sure how to answer a question…that’s when the fun happens.”

This article is dedicated to the late Dr. Regis Boyle, a wonderful journalism teacher. “Accuracy and Reliability!”