Tad grew up on the Chesapeake Bay, the son of a U.S. Navy officer, before serving as a Reconnaissance Scout in the U.S. Army and spending a decade in Democratic politics. Those early experiences—movement, service, and civic life—eventually pulled him toward the deeper currents of American history.

He studied at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the University of Virginia, where he earned his PhD in History with a focus on the American Revolution. His public history career began at Colonial Williamsburg, where he served as the institution’s historian for four years. He later returned to Harvard as a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Fellow and joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins. Along the way, he has held major fellowships at Brown, Yale, and Monticello, and has taught at Harvard, Roger Williams University, and the University of Virginia.

Today, Tad teaches public history as a Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins and as an External Lecturer at the University of Southern Denmark. He is also the Film and Digital Media Editor of The Public Historian. His current project, A Public History of the American Revolution, extends the resistance history framework into the founding era—using the same methods, questions, and commitments to show how the Revolution can be understood, explained, and used without the patriotic filters that have long obscured its meaning.

He and his family divide their time between Denmark and Cape Cod.