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Samuel Eliot Morison

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Samuel Eliot Morison
Samuel Eliot Morison in his official U.S. Navy portrait
AllegianceUnited States of America
Service / branchUnited States Navy
Years of service1942–1946
RankRear Admiral (Reserve)
Battles / warsWorld War II
AwardsSee article

Samuel Eliot Morison, Rear Admiral, United States Naval Reserve (July 9, 1887 – May 15, 1976) was an American historian noted for works of history (especially maritime history) that were both authoritative and highly readable. A sailor as well as a scholar, Morison garnered numerous literary prizes, military honors, and national awards from both foreign countries and United States, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Some of his textbooks continue to be widely used,[citation needed] though his treatment of American slavery in early editions was criticised as minimizing its brutality.[1]

Life

Born in Boston to John Holmes Morison (1856–1911) and Emily Marshall (Eliot) Morison (1857–1925), Morison was named for his grandfather Samuel Eliot.

Typically for a Boston Brahmin, he attended Noble and Greenough School (1897–1901) and St. Paul's (1901–03), then earned his AB (1908) from Harvard, where he was a member of the Phoenix S.K. Club.

After studying at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (1908–1909) Morison returned to Harvard, earning his Ph.D. in 1912. He became an instructor in history at UC Berkeley, then in 1915 again returned to Harvard, where he served in the same capacity. After spending 1922–25 at Oxford as Harmsworth Professor of American History, he was appointed a full professor at Harvard in 1925, then Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History in 1941. He retired from Harvard in 1955.

With Elizabeth S. Greene, his first wife, he had four children (one of whom, Emily Morison Beck, became editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations).[2] Elizabeth died in 1945, and in 1949 Morison married Baltimore widow Priscilla Barton, who died in 1973. Morison himself died of a stroke on May 15, 1976. His ashes are buried at Northeast Harbor, Maine.

Morison wrote or co-wrote numerous works on history (especially military history) and related subjects.[vague] In History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians (1946) he urged that vivid writing springs from the synergy of experience and research:[citation needed]

American historians, in their eagerness to present facts and their laudable concern to tell the truth, have neglected the literary aspects of their craft. They have forgotten that there is an art of writing history.

Many of his best works were written after his official retirement from Harvard, and many continue to be reissued.[citation needed] Morison enjoyed considerable recognition during his lifetime, receiving two Pulitzer and two Bancroft Prizes, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Emerson-Thoreau Medal (1961), a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1962), the Balzan Prize (1962), and numerous honorary degrees, military awards, and honors from foreign nations.[3] In presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, US President Lyndon Johnson declared of Morison:

Scholar and sailor, this amphibious historian has combined a life of action and literary craftsmanship to lead two generations of Americans on countless voyages of discovery.[4]

The frigate USS Samuel Eliot Morison is named for Morison, as are the Samuel Eliot Morison Award of the USS Constitution Museum,[citation needed] the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature of the Naval Order of the United States, and the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command's Samuel Eliot Morison Naval History Scholarship.[5] Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall features a bronze statue depicting Morison in sailor's oilskin.

Works

Statue of Morison on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue.

Morison's Harvard dissertation was the basis for his first book, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765–1848 (1913). His early childhood is charmingly described in One Boy's Boston: 1887-1901 (1962).

In 1942, Morison was commissioned a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Naval Reserve as part of the military's program (which Morison himself had proposed)[6]of careful documentation of World War II. The result was the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, fifteen volumes (1947-1962) documenting everything from strategy and tactics to technology and the exploits of individuals -- a work which British military historian Sir John Keegan has called the best to come out of that conflict.[citation needed] Volume 3 was also issued as The Rising Sun in the Pacific (1948, Bancroft Prize, 1949), and a single-volume abridgement of the series, The Two Ocean War, appeared in 1963. Morison retired from the Navy in 1951 as a Rear Admiral.[6]

For Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942; Pulitzer Prize 1943), Morison combined his personal interest in sailing with his scholarship by actually sailing to the various places that Christopher Columbus was then thought to have visited. Similarly, his research for Samuel De Champlain: Father of New France (1972) including sailing many of the routes taken by Champlain, and tracing others by airplane. Morison's other works on European exploration include:

  • Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century (1940)
  • Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Little, Brown and Company, 1955)
  • The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (1971; Bancroft Prize 1972)
  • The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages (1974)
  • The Growth of the American Republic (1930)
  • The Oxford History of the United States (1927)
  • The Growth of the American Republic (with Henry Steele Commager, New York: Oxford University Press, 1930 [as Oxford History of the United States; 7th ed., 1980]. Revised and abridged edition with Samuel Eliot Morison and William E. Leuchtenberg. Published by Oxford University Press in 1980 as A Concise History of the American Republic, rev. 1983.
  • The Oxford History of the American People (1965)
  • "America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy."
  • "But sea power has never led to despotism. The nations that have enjoyed sea power even for a brief period—Athens, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, the United States—are those that have preserved freedom for themselves and have given it to others. Of the despotism to which unrestrained military power leads we have plenty of examples from Alexander to Mao." The Oxford History of the American People (1965)

Morison wrote a number of works specifically on the history of New England:

  • The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 (1921)
  • Builders of the Bay Colony: A Gallery of Our Intellectual Ancestors (1930; 2nd ed., 1964)
  • The Founding of Harvard College (1935)
  • Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (1936)
  • Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936 (1936)
  • The Puritan Pronaos (1936)
  • The Ropemakers of Plymouth (1950)
  • The Story of the 'Old Colony' of New Plymouth (1956)
  • Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (ed., 1952)

Other works by Morison include:

  • By Land and By Sea (1953)
  • John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1959; Pulitzer Prize 1960)
  • The Story of Mount Desert Island (1960)

Criticism

With coauthor Henry Steele Commager, Morison wrote the popular and influential[citation needed] college textbook The Growth of the American Republic, first published in 1930. However, the sections treating slavery (penned by Morison) later came under heavy criticism:

Starting in 1950, for example, African Americans petitioned well-known race liberals Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison to revise their popular textbook, Growth of the American Republic, which declared that the American slave—or "Sambo," as the text called him—was "adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy." Privately, the authors joked about Black complaints—"bushman squawks," Morison called them—against their book. "Felix the nigger-baiter is funny!" Morison told Commager, using the latter's nickname. Miffed by attacks upon his own liberal credentials, Morison stressed that his daughter was married to [the son of] Jewish NAACP President Joel Spingarn—[7]and that "Sambo" had been Morison's childhood nickname. Eventually, Morison agreed to remove the term "pickanninies"; in future editions, he quipped, Black children would be described only as "nice little seal-brown darlings." But he insisted upon retaining "Sambo," "Uncle Daniel," and several other images of slave docility. "I will be damned if I will take them out for ... anybody," Morison told Commager.[1]

At the same time,

southern segregationists condemned [Morison and Comanger] as too friendly to Blacks. The authors provided brief discussions of racial segregation and campaigns against it, causing many southern school districts to blacklist their book.[1]

Morison removed the offending material in the 1962 edition[1] -- the next earlier edition had been 1951 --[citation needed] replacing it with a description of slave revolts.[1]

Military and foreign honors


Honorary degrees

References

  1. ^ a b c d e "web.archive.org/web/20050318073017/http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/heq/44.1/zimmerman.html". Archived from the original on 2005-03-18.
  2. ^ Douglas Martin, "Emily Morison Beck, 88, Who Edited Bartlett's Quotations, Dies", New York Times, 31 Mar 2004.
  3. ^ list of International Balzan Foundation prize winners
  4. ^ American Presidency Project - Remarks by Lyndon B. Johnson, Medal of Freedom Award to Morison and others 14 Sep 1964
  5. ^ Dept. of the Navy - Samuel Eliot Morison Naval History Scholarship
  6. ^ a b Naval History & Heritage Command - Biographies
  7. ^ Zimmerman's text reads, "Morison stressed that his daughter was married to Jewish NAACP President Joel Spingarn"; in fact Morison's daughter Elizabeth Gray Morison married Joel Spingarn's son Edward ("Milestones," Time, Dec. 30, 1940). In quoting Zimmerman here that error has been corrected.
  8. ^ Fuerza Aerea Dominicana: Vuelo Panamericano: "Acontecimientos de significativa trascendencia histórica, que repercutó en todos los países latinoamericanos, del [C]aribe y Europa, lo fue el Vuelo Panamericano[.] El recorrido aéreo por los cielos americanos fue una proyección de la Quinta Conferencia Internacional Americana, donde los Estados Unidos pertenecientes en el cónclave aprobaron por unanimidad la Resolución mediante la cual se recomendó a los Gobiernos de las Repúblicas Americanas, honrar la memoria del Gran Almirante Don Cristóbal Colón con la erección de un Faro Monumental en su honor [...]. Los gobiernos de Cuba y la República Dominicana, receptivos de esa directiva, se decidieron por mancomunar esfuerzos para crear una escuadrilla aérea que rasgara los espacios etéreos en recorrido de Buena Voluntad por los países americanos, haciendo de ese modo un llamado fraternal [...]. La Escuadrilla Panamericana estuvo integrada por cuatro aviones. Tres de ellos procedían de Cuba y pertenecían a la Sociedad Columbista Panamericana, al Ejército Constitucionalista de Cuba y a la Marina Constitucional Cubana, respectivamente." ("An event of important historical significance that had an impact on all the Latin American countries, of the [C]arribean and Europe, was the Pan-American flight through the (South) American airspace. It was a project of the Fifth International American Conference where the United States was included in a meeting that approved unanimously the resolution by which they recommended that the governments of the American republics honor the memory of the great Admiral Christopher Columbus with the erection of a memorial lighthouse in his honour. [...] The governments of Cuba and The Dominican Republic receptive to this suggestion decided between themselves to unite forces to create an air squadron that would rip through the the ether in a flypast of good faith for the American countries in a gesture of friendship. [...] The Panamerican Squadron was formed of four planes. Three of them came from Cuba and belonged to the Panamerican Columbist Society, the National Army of Cuba and the Cuban National Navy respectively.")

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