Geoffrey Champion Ward (born 1940) is an American editor, author, historian and writer of scripts for American history documentaries for public television. He is the author or co-author of 19 books, including 10 companion books to the documentaries he has written. He is the winner of seven Emmy Awards. Biography Youth Ward was born in Newark, Ohio, and is a graduate of Oberlin College (1962), where he majored in art. He had initially planned to be a painter. His father was F. Champion Ward, educator and a Vice-President of the Ford Foundation. Ward spent some of his boyhood years in India. Ward's great-grandfather was Ferdinand Ward, a 19th-century swindler whose ponzi scheme lead to a financial crash which bankrupted many investors, including Ulysses S. Grant and Thomas Nast. Ward wrote a book about the story of his great-grandfather, A Disposition to be Rich, in 2012. Career Early career Ward was the founding editor of Audience Magazine (1970-1973) and the editor of American Heritage Magazine (1977-1982). His 1989 biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, A First-class Temperament: the Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Later career Ward has been a long-time collaborator of American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. Ward describes being asked to write the script for Huey Long after meeting Burns at his house in Walpole, New Hampshire. The principal writer of the television mini-series The Civil War (1990), Ward has collaborated with its co-producer Ken Burns on most of the documentaries he has made since, including Jazz, Baseball, The War, and The Vietnam War. The films with Burns have garnered him five Emmy Awards. He has won an additional two Emmys for The Kennedys (1992), and TR, The Story of Theodore Roosevelt (1996). His script for the documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, won the Writers Guild of America Award in 2005, and the accompanying book won the 2006 William Hill Sports Book of the Year and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for best biography. In 2006, the Organization of American Historians gave Ward their Friend of History Award for his outstanding contributions to American history: Over the last twenty years Geoffrey Ward's writings on American History have had a greater influence and reached a wider audience than those of any other American writer