Name Gilbert Sewall | ||
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Gilbert T. Sewall (born September 28, 1946) is an educator and author who writes on the humanities, education, and culture. He is currently a contributor to the American Spectator and a non-fiction book reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Since 1989, he has been director of the American Textbook Council, an independent textbook and curriculum review organization.
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Early life and career
A native of Los Angeles, California, Sewall is a 1967 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and holds advanced degrees from Brown University in history and Columbia University in journalism.
From 1970 to 1978 Sewall was an instructor of history at Phillips Academy, Andover, where he taught American history and founded the school’s economics and art history programs. He introduced water polo to the school as a team sport and was its first coach. Sewall was later education editor at Newsweek magazine where he won national prizes for articles on testing and textbooks.
Sewall has been on the adjunct faculties of New York University and Boston University, and a research associate at the Institute of Politics and Philosophy of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Since 1990, he has been an affiliated scholar with the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Sewall has been Fellow of the National Humanities Center and a Kenan Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where he has also twice been a Visiting Scholar.
Sewall is a former member of the Publishing Research Quarterly and Phi Delta Kappan editorial boards. He was on the Committee on the Use of Volunteers in Schools of the National Research Council in 1990 and the Executive Committee of the National Council for History Standards from 1992 to 1994.
In the wake of Donald Trump's 2016 election as President of the United States, Sewall argues that the left, contrary to evidence, has launched "a concerted semantic campaign" to smear him by associating him with white supremacists.
Sewall lives in New York City.
Writings and Publications
Sewall is the author of Necessary Lessons: Decline and Renewal in American Schools (Free Press, 1983) and the co-author of After Hiroshima: The USA since 1945 (Longman, 3rd edition, 1992). He is editor of The Eighties: A Reader (Perseus, 1997). His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, American Educator, and many other publications. His textbook studies include History Textbooks: A Standard and Guide (1994) and Islam in the Classroom: What the Textbooks Tell Us (2008). In 2010 he created the instructional website, Neoclassicism and America 1750-1900, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, revised in 2016.