James H. Madison

James H. Madison is Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, where he spent his career as one of the foremost scholars of Indiana and Midwestern American history. He earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University and held the Thomas and Kathryn Miller Chair in History. His scholarship spans Indiana political and social history, the history of American race relations, and the history of the American Midwest in the twentieth century. Among his most significant works are The Indiana Way: A State History (1986), Eli Lilly: A Life, 1885-1977 (1989), A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (2001), and World War II: A History in Documents. His 2020 book The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland, published by Indiana University Press, brought decades of archival research on the 1920s Indiana Klan to a general audience and received the Meridian Award for History. Madison is recognized for his ability to make rigorous scholarship accessible without sacrificing analytical depth, and his work on Indiana’s Klan history has taken on renewed urgency in contemporary discussions of American political extremism.