Jamie Elizabeth Stiehm is a Washington journalist and public speaker who writes a syndicated column on national politics and history for Creators Syndicate. Her commentaries and op-eds have appeared in leading newspapers across the nation, such as American Heritage, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and San Francisco Chronicle. She wrote several essays for The New York Times' “Disunion” series on the Civil War, one of which, The War Comes Home for Lee, was chosen for their hardbound collection, Disunion, published by Oxford University Press (2016).
Jamie is also known as a dynamic popular speaker on American history and democracy. Three talks aired on C-SPAN. An expert on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War as well as the woman suffrage and abolitionist movements, she wove an essay and talk on how Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman lived parallel lives from being born enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. As a scholar-speaker, she engages with how outsiders - such as Quaker abolitionists - resisted government power and succeeded in opening the way for creating social change.
Before launching her career as a syndicated columnist, Jamie worked at The Baltimore Sun as a metropolitan reporter for ten years. She also worked at The Hill as a reporter, covering Congress. During this time, The New York Times Syndicate signed her up as a young columnist and fresh voice. Jamie’s first job in journalism was at CBS News in London, where she worked as an assignment editor with the network’s best correspondents and producers. Living abroad gave her insight into what England and America love and hate about each other. Her first op-ed (from London) was in a light vein, “An Anglophile’s Disillusionment.”
Jamie’s family hometown is Madison, Wisconsin. She spent most of her girlhood in Santa Monica. Going east, she majored in history at Swarthmore College and graduated with a masters degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Politics and history, the bedrock of her journalism career, prepared her well to be a American storyteller in longer form.
Jamie lives in Washington. She is at work on her first book.
