Born in Baltimore and raised on the Chesapeake Bay, he is the son of a U.S. Navy officer and a U.S. Army veteran himself. His work brings American history out of the seminar room and into public life, connecting the past to the political, cultural, and moral questions people are still living with now.

He is the author of A Resistance History of the United States (Steerforth, 2026), with A Public History of the American Revolution forthcoming from Steerforth in 2027 and The Patriot Myth forthcoming in 2028. His scholarship and public work focus especially on the American Revolution, public memory, resistance, nationalism, and the stories Americans tell themselves about freedom, power, belonging, and dissent.

Tad teaches public history at Johns Hopkins University and serves as an external lecturer at the University of Southern Denmark, where he specializes in American history. He is also the film and digital media editor of The Public Historian, the leading journal in the field of public history.

His route to the profession was not especially linear, which is part of the point. Before becoming a historian, Tad served as a U.S. Army cavalry scout, attended law school at Tulane, and spent a decade working in national politics in Washington, D.C. He later returned to graduate study, first at Johns Hopkins, where he studied with Jack Greene, and then at the University of Virginia, where he earned his PhD in history. He got his start in public history as a historian at Colonial Williamsburg, during which he was responsible for the historical content of all its public programs. He was subsequently a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Fellow at Harvard, where he also taught public history. He is an alumnus of Johns Hopkins, UVA, and Harvard.

That background — military service, politics, law, archives, classrooms, and public-facing media — shapes the way he writes and teaches history. His approach is direct, unsentimental, and built for public audiences: rigorous enough for the academy, sharp enough for the present, and committed to making history matter beyond the page.