James Gilbert was born in Chicago in 1939 and moved with his parents to Flossmoor, Illinois, a small golfing suburb located on the main southern commuter rail into the city. He attended Carleton College and then the University of Wisconsin, earning a doctoral degree in American Intellectual and Cultural History. In 1966, he was hired by the University of Maryland, just outside Washington, DC and remained there, appointed Distinguished University Professor in 1999. Over the course of his career, he published eleven history texts, one of them (PERFECT CITIES) named a New York Times notable book of the year in 1986. Throughout his career, he has often succumbed to a love of travel made possible by teaching at the University of Paris and Warwick University in England, and with Fulbright Awards, at the University of Sydney, the University of Amsterdam, Erfurt and Tubingen Universities in Germany, and Uppsala University in Sweden, where he was given an honorary Doctoral Degree. Until 2020, he was the Faculty Fulbright Adviser at the University of Maryland.

While American history has been his profession, literature has been his passion, and since retirement, he has written several novels and short stories, some of which are referenced here. He is also a (very) amateur cellist.