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# Robert McDonald 

Professor of History, Department of History & War Studies, United States Military Academy; Adjunct Scholar 

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Robert M. S. McDonald is a professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute. 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 is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his PhD. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife, Christine, and their children Jefferson and Grace.

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