Robert P. Watson
political scientist and author

Robert P. Watson (born 1962) is an American political scientist and a historian of US politics, and the author of several books on US political and military history. Watson holds the titles Distinguished Professor of American History, Avron Fogelman Research Professor, and Assistant Director of the Center for Citizenship and Civility at Lynn University in Florida.
Education
Watson holds a bachelor's degree from Virginia Tech, a master's degree from the University of West Florida, and a Ph.D. from Florida Atlantic University. He was a member of the football and track teams at Virginia Tech and has been inducted into two sports halls of fame.
Career
Watson held positions at Troy University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, and Florida Atlantic University, before joining the faculty of Lynn University in 2007. He has won several Distinguished Teacher of the Year awards in his career. He also taught with the Junior Statesman Foundation at Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown, and served as a visiting scholar at several universities in the US.
Books
Watson is the author of books, including:
The Presidents' Wives: Reassessing the Office of the First Lady (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000; 2nd ed., 2014)
First Ladies of the United States: A Biographical Dictionary (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001)
Affairs of State: The Untold History of Presidential Love, Sex, and Scandal (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012)
America's First Crisis: The War of 1812 (SUNY Press, 2014)
The Nazi Titanic: The Incredible Untold Story of a Doomed Ship in World War II (Hachette Books, 2016)
The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn: An Untold Story of the American Revolution (Hachette Books, 2017)
George Washington's Final Battle: The Epic Struggle to Build a Capital and Nation (Georgetown University Press, 2021)
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7348246. VIAF identifies the subject as 98411088. The Library of Congress control number is n99027118. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 2007, 2000 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert P. Watson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.