James Axtell `59 graduated from Sidney High School with honors and as a star athlete in basketball and track. He went immediately to Yale University where he earned a B.A. and to Oxford International Summer School. He received his Ph.D. in History from Cambridge University and was subsequently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard. At both Yale and Cambridge he broke track records in the long jump and triple jump.
Since then, he has received several fellowships, including from theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at Yale, Sarah Lawrence College, Northwestern University, and since 1976 at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he holds the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities chair.
A few of his awards are the National Endowment for the Humanities Award for Teaching and Scholarship; Viginia's Outstanding Faculty Award; the Loyola-Mellon Humanities Award from Loyola University, Chicago; election to the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and, most significantly, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (founded by John Adams in 1780).
He has published 17 books and more than 65 articles, establishing himself as one of the country's leading authorities on Early American history, Native American history, and the history of American higher education. By the same token, he has served on the Editorial Boards of the History of Education Quarterly, the William & Mary Quarterly, and Ethnohistory, and was president of the American Society for Ethnohistory and chairman of the American Historical Association's Columbus Quincentenary Committee.
Among his awards and honors his most cherished are the Virginia state award for Outstanding Faculty and his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jim's philosophy, developed from an educational culture that featured Mary Ruland, Anna Heimer, Lydia Metz, Robert Rankin, and other outstanding teachers in Sidney, has kept him proudly at a public university, where his commitment to learning and teaching have made him a beloved teacher of both graduate students and undergraduates.