Jan Ellen Lewis was born in St. Louis, Missouri on July 10, 1949. She received a bachelor's degree in history from Bryn Mawr College and master's degrees in American culture and history and a Ph.D. in early American history from the University of Michigan. She started teaching at Rutgers University, Newark in 1977. She became the first woman to chair its history department and had served as dean of the school of arts and sciences since 2014.
Her book, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia, was published in 1983. She co-wrote the textbook Of the People: A History of the United States, co-edited with Peter Stearns An Emotional History of the United States, and co-edited with Peter S. Onuf and James Horn The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race and the New Republic. In 1999, she and Onuf organized the Hemings-Jefferson conference, which reassessed Thomas Jefferson's legacy after DNA testing showed that he had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. Lewis died from complications of a bone-marrow transplant on August 28, 2018 at the age of 69.
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