Sail250® Virginia Speaker Series Presents

Ian Toll is a renowned author and historian of U.S. maritime history. He graduated with a B.A. in history from Georgetown University and an M.A. in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Toll served as an aide and speechwriter to U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes (MD), Lt. Gov. Stan Lundine (NY), and was an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Toll received the Samuel Elliot Morison Award for Naval Literature and the William E. Colby Military Writers’ Award for his first book, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (2006).

In 2011, Toll published The Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942, which was the first volume in his Pacific War Trilogy. The book won the Northern California Book Award for Nonfiction in 2012. The next book in the series, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944, was a New York Times Best Seller and was selected as the best book of 2016 by the editor of Financial Times. The last book in the series, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (2020), was also a New York Times Best Seller.

Mr. Toll has published articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and has been a reviewer for the New York Times Review of Books. He has lectured at the U.S. Naval Academy, the Pentagon, the U.S. Treasury Department, the National World War II Museum, and the Naval War College. In 2019, Ian Toll received the Samuel Eliot Morison Award from the USS Constitution Museum.