October 12, 2001

Questioning Ellis's Research as Well as His Biography

To the Editor:

In her September 7 article on Mount Holyoke College's decision to suspend the historian Joseph J. Ellis for his years of lying to his students about himself, Ana Marie Cox notes that "the veracity of Mr. Ellis's writings on his specialty, the colonial period, was never questioned" by the college ("Mount Holyoke Suspends Historian for False Statements About Serving in Vietnam"). It should have been.

In his biography of Thomas Jefferson, for example, Ellis writes