About the Author

 

Dr. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History at Lafayette College and author of eight books, including Lewis Mumford, A Life, named a New York Times Notable Book and nominated for seven literary awards. “With this large, large spirited life of Lewis Mumford, Donald L. Miller takes his place in the first rank of contemporary American biographers,” writes biographer and historian David McCullough, who has also called Miller “one of our ablest historians.”

Miller’s biography was recently re-republished by Grove Press as part of its series, “Grove Great Lives,” a collection of “classic twentieth century biographies.”

 “The America that shaped Mumford is gone. But to read his life as Donald Miller narrates it is to gain, for a few hours, that lost world back,“ writes Hugh Kenner in the Washington Times.

Henry Steele Commager and Norman Cousins have hailed Miller’s other book on Mumford, The Lewis Mumford Reader as a “superb” introduction “to one of the most celebrated minds of the twentieth century….[Miller’s] book,” writes Cousins, “is a treasure-house for all those who think that the human mind can make a difference in the human situation.”

Miller co-authored with Richard Sharpless, The Kingdom of Coal: Work, Enterprise, and Ethnic Communities in the Mine Fields. The book has been cited as the “the first comprehensive history of the industry and the culture that it spawned” and one of the best books ever published on “a giant American industry.” It was nominated for over a half dozen prizes, including the Francis Parkman Prize and the Bancroft Prize. A seven-part National Public Radio series by Miller based on the book won first prize in the Excellence in Broadcasting Competition in 1989.

Miller’s prize-winning best-seller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America received the Great Lakes Book Award for non-fiction in 1996, and was made into a seven hour documentary film series for PBS’s The American Experience. In a front page review in Book World, the Washington Post described the book as “sweeping and beautifully written.” Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times hailed it as “a wonderfully readable account of Chicago’s…history.” And John Barron of the Chicago Sun Times wrote that “Miller has written what will be judged as the great Chicago history.”

Historians and reviewers have described Miller’s The Story of World War II as one of the finest works written on modern warfare, “a major publishing event,” in the words of David McCullough. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that “it is likely to remain a classic for generations to come.”

“Put together with skill and sensitivity, it is a chronicle of ruin and agony, both a tribune and a warning,” wrote National Book Award-winner Paul Fussell, who named Miller’s book one of the three outstanding works published on the history of the war. Amazon.com named it one of the Top Ten Books on War, a list that included Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Elie Wiesel’s Night.

“This is the one book that deserves to be titled THE Story of World II,” writes James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers, and Flyboys. “Miller,” writes Andrew Carroll, author of the best-selling War Letters,” has crafted a suspenseful and riveting retelling of perhaps the greatest story in human history.”

The chapters on the Pacific War in The Story of World War II were adopted for an award-winning American Experience television documentary, Victory in the Pacific, which aired in May, 2005. This film was recently nominated for three Emmy Awards: Outstanding Historical Programming-Long Form; Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Writing; and Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Research.

Miller’s D-Days in the Pacific, the story of the American re-conquest of the Pacific from Imperial Japan, was named one of the Outstanding Books on Military History in 2006 by both the Washington Post and World War II Magazine. It is a companion volume for the History Channel Series with the same title, which aired in August, 2006.

Miller's newest book, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, has been selected by three major book clubs: Book of the Month, History Book Club, and Military History Book Club. The book has also been added to the reading list of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force Professional Reading Program.

Miller was the lead scholar, writer, and host of the 26-part PBS series, A Biography of America. The series has been adopted for course use by over 200 colleges and universities and won several national television awards. Miller has been an historical advisor, commentator, scriptwriter, or host for over 40 television productions, including the History Channel's Movies in Time, and the national television productions, Ulysses Grant, Abe and Mary Lincoln, April, 1865: The Month that Saved America, The Rockefellers, The Great Chicago Fire, Marshall Field: American Merchant Prince, The Hidden History of Chicago, Night of the Long Knives, and America, 1900, winner of the prestigious Peabody Prize. He most recently served as an on-camera expert for a documentary on the Chicago World Fair of 1893, which will appear on the National Geographic Channel this fall.

Miller is active in urban affairs and city planning. He wrote the introduction to Metropolis 2020, a master plan for the city of Chicago that was published by the University of Chicago Press. He has lectured in this country and Europe on architecture and city design.

Miller’s articles have appeared in national publications, among them The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. He is a contributing editor of American Heritage Magazine.

In May 2004, Miller was chosen by the Smithsonian Institution to give the “kick-off” event of its D-Day celebrations on the Washington Mall--a series of lectures at the Smithsonian on the history of World War II. 

Miller has been the keynote speaker at events sponsored by professional, business, and academic audiences. Among the organizations he has spoken to are: IBM, AT&T, the Federal Reserve Bank (Chicago), The Chicago Historical Society, the Aspen Institute, the Television Critics Association, Russell Reynolds Associates, the New York State Assembly, the American Architectural Association, the Smithsonian Institution, the National D-Day Museum, the Municipal Arts Society, New York, the American Historical Association, the Annenberg Foundation, the World Trade Center Chicago, the Embassy of the United States, London, Churchill College, Cambridge, and the National Press Club.

Miller received his Ph.D., from the University of Maryland and joined the Lafayette College faculty in 1978. He has also taught at Cornell University’s School for Industrial and Labor Relations, the Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Oxford University. He is the recipient of an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from St. Vincent College and Outstanding Alumni awards from the University of Maryland and Ohio University.

Miller has won six awards for excellence in teaching, five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a number of prestigious book awards. He was a resident scholar at All Souls College, Oxford, and was also named the Crayenborgh Lecturer at Leiden University, The Netherlands. In addition to his teaching and writing responsibilities, he is co-chair of the Planning Committee for the National D-Day Museum’s upcoming International Conference on World War II and is on the Board of Trustees Planning Committee for St. Vincent College. Following the Katrina Hurricane, he appeared on CNN and National Public Radio and was quoted by a number of national publications, including The New York Times, for his writings on American and European urban disasters, including the Great Chicago Fire and the destruction by bombing of the World War II cities of Japan and Germany.

 

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