J. McIver Weatherford

Jack Weatherford is the New York Times bestselling author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed The world The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God, and The History of Money. His books have been published in more than thirty languages.

In 2006 he spoke at the United Nations at the invitation of Russia and India to honor the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Mongol nation by Genghis Khan. In 2007 President Enkhbayar of Mongolia awarded him the Order of the Polar Star. In 2022 on the 860th anniversary of the birth of Genghis Khan, President Khurelsukh made him the first foreigner to receive Mongolia’s highest honor the Order of Chinggis Khan which had only been awarded fifteen times in Mongolian history.

Although the original Spanish edition of Indian Givers was banned in some parts of Latin America, nearly a quarter of a century later in 2014 Bolivia honored him for this work on the indigenous people of the Americas with the Order of the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho, Antonio José Sucre and named him Honorary Cultural Ambassador of Bolivia’s Casa de Libertad in the Constitutional Capital Sucre, and honorary citizen of Potosí.

In 1964 he graduated from Dreher High School with Walker Pearce to whom he was married from 1970 until her death from multiple sclerosis in 2013. After a graduate degree from the University of South Carolina, he earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego with additional graduate work at Frankfurt University and Duke University. He worked as legislative assistant to Senator John Glenn and taught for twenty-nine years at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he held the DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Chair of Anthropology.

He now lives at Tur Hurah on the Bogd Khan Mountain in Mongolia.