Edmund Morgan (historian)

Edmund Sears Morgan
Born	(1916-01-17) January 17, 1916 Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Residence	United States
Institutions	University of Chicago, Brown University, Yale University
Alma mater	Harvard College
Doctoral advisor	Perry Miller
Doctoral students	David S. Lovejoy, Joseph Ellis

Edmund Sears Morgan (born January 17, 1916 in Minneapolis, Minnesota), an eminent authority on early American history, is Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986.

Life

Morgan's interest in history grew while he attended Belmont Hill School outside of Boston, and while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization there in 1942, studying under Perry Miller. He began his teaching career at the University of Chicago (1945–46) and then at Brown (1946–55) before becoming a professor at Yale, where he directed many PhD dissertations in colonial history.

He has written many books covering a range of topics in the history of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, using intellectual, social, biographical and political history approaches. Two of his early books, Birth of the Republic (1956) and The Puritan Dilemma (1958), have for decades been required reading in many undergraduate history courses. His works include American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), which won the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, the Southern Historical Association's Charles S. Sydnor Prize and the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award, and Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), which won Columbia University's Bancroft Prize in American History in 1989. He has also written biographies of Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams, and Benjamin Franklin.

Morgan in 1975 argued that Virginians in the 1650s--and for the next two centuries--turned to slavery and a racial divide as an alternative to class conflict. "Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty." That is, white men became politically much more equal than was possible without a population of low-status slaves.

Awards

In 1971 he was awarded the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa's William Clyde DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching and scholarship, considered one of the most prestigious teaching prizes for Yale faculty. In 1971-1972 Morgan served as president of the Organization of American Historians. In 1972, he became the first recipient of the Douglass Adair Memorial Award for scholarship in early American history, and in 1986 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Historical Association. He has also won numerous fellowships and garnered a number of honorary degrees and named lectureships. He became a Sterling Professor, one of Yale's highest distinctions, in 1965. Morgan was awarded the 2000 National Humanities Medal by the U.S. President Bill Clinton at a ceremony for "extraordinary contributions to American cultural life and thought." In 2006, he received a Pulitzer Prize "for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century."

Books

• Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century (1952)
• The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (1953), with Helen M. Morgan
• The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (1956)
• The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958)
• The American Revolution: A Review of Changing Interpretations (1958)
• The Mirror of the Indian (1958)
• Editor, Prologue to the Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764-1766 (1959)
• The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795 (1962)
• The National Experience: A History of the United States (1963) coauthor of textbook; several editions
• Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (1963)
• Editor, The Founding of Massachusetts: Historians and the Sources (1964)
• The American Revolution: Two Centuries of Interpretation (1965)
• Puritan Political Ideas, 1558-1794 (1965)
• The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653-1657: The Conscience of a Puritan (1965)
• The Puritan Family ([1944] 1966)
• Roger Williams: The Church and the State (1967)
• So What about History? (1969)
• American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975)
• The Meaning of Independence: John Adams, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson (1976, reprint with new foreword, 2004)
• The Genius of George Washington (1980)
• Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988)
• Benjamin Franklin (2002)
• The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America (2004), collected articles and reviews
• American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America (2009), collection of essays

References

• John M. Murrin. "Edmund S. Morgan," in Robert Allen Rutland, ed. Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000 U of Missouri Press. (2000) pp 126–137

External links

• Morgan Bio at Yale
• Morgan bio on History News Network
• Morgan author page and archive from The New York Review of Books