James T. Patterson (born February 12, 1935, in Old Lyme, Connecticut) is an American historian,[1] who was the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Brown University for 30 years.

He then served for sixth months in the U.S. Army before taking a job at the Hartford Courant, where, he says, "I was responsible for writing 25 inches of news every day, and I learned to write quickly, using strong verbs, because I knew that the audience was made up of American adults at the breakfast table.

[7][8] In the 1970s, Patterson noticed a trend away from the academic writing of political history and toward an emphasis on societal issues such as race, class, and gender.

In keeping with this trend, in 1987 he published The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture, chronicling the societal reaction to the disease from the 1880s to the 1980s, and exploring the social tensions and the persistence of fear caused by its specter, and how it reveals divisions in American life.

In his next four books, Patterson tackled the civil rights case of Brown v. Board of Education, the period from the Watergate era to the Bush v. Gore election of 2000, the Moynihan Report, and the seminal year 1965.