William M. Fowler Jr. is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Northeastern University. He is the author of ten books on American history, including American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783 (Bloomsbury), The Baron of Beacon Hill: A Biography of John Hancock (Houghton Mifflin), Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (Longman), and Rebels Under Sail: A History of the American Navy in the Revolution (Scribner's). In 2006 he was named the first Gay Hart Gaines Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Mount Vernon. Between 2008 and 2010 he was the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati George Washington Distinguished Professor. Since 2016 he has been a lead scholar for the George Washington Teacher Institute at Mount Vernon. He lives in Reading, Massachusetts.