Edmund S. Morgan
What They're Famous For
Edmund Morgan is the Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University.
Morgan has authored dozens of books on Puritan and early colonial history,
which are acclaimed for both their scholarly focus and their appeal to a general
audience.
Michael Kammen in the Washington Post Book World described Morgan as"one of the most
distinguished historians of the United States." His books have challenged traditional
assumptions about the forces that shaped early American history, including the lives and beliefs of the Puritans and the
impetus for the Revolutionary War. Morgan has earned a reputation as an historian of
people as well as of ideas, and as a writer of wide appeal. Bruce Kuklick, writing in
Books and Culture, maintained that"Edmund Morgan is arguably the finest living
American historian."
Morgan's most influencial books include The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to
Revolution (1953), 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, and 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. Two of his early books, Birth of the Republic (1956) and The Puritan
Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958) which is a standard text on the topic used in
University courses.
Morgan has received many awards throughout his prolific career for his work as a writer
and a professor, including a lifetime achievement Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for"a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half-century."
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 1972 he became the first recipient of the
Douglas Adair Memorial Award for scholarship in early American history, and in 1986 he
received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Historical Association.
In 1965 Morgan became a Sterling Professor, one of Yale's highest distinctions, and
was awarded the 2000 National Humanities Medal by the US President
Bill Clinton at a ceremony for"extraordinary contributions to American cultural life and
thought."
Morgan's own interest in history grew while he was an undergraduate at Harvard, where he
went on to earn his Ph.D in 1942. At Harvard Morgan studied under Perry Miller.
Since he became a historian, he has witnessed a major change in his field.
In 2002, he achieved his first New York Times best-seller with Benjamin Franklin
Morgan attributes this to"the geezer factor. There just aren't that
many 86-year-olds writing books, so when they do, it's quite an event."
Personal Anecdote
The Calvinist
It was the 29th of August, 1938. After a postgraduate year at the London School of Economics I had been touring Europe with a friend, and we were then spending a week in Freiburg im Breisgau, not far from the French border. In a fit of cultural enthusiasm we had decided to travel to Colmar to view the famous altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald, a day trip by train via Breissach on the German border.
Before describing what happened there and how it affected me, I need to say that I had spent four years at Harvard under the tutorship of Perry Miller, whose respect for ideas and need to share them had given direction to my college years. He, like myself, was a confirmed atheist but at the same time an admirer and profound student of Puritan theology and its elegant scheme of thought. His studies of that scheme would bring him recognition as the foremost intellectual historian of his day. As a student and admirer of Miller, I had devoted much of my college studies to growing familiar with the doctrines of predestination, original sin, divine perfection, human depravity, and theodicy (the defense of God's goodness despite the existence of evil). Puritan theology commanded respect as a rigorous intellectual system. But I had never quite accepted its dire view of the human condition, its insistence on the innate depravity of human beings. At twenty-two most people did not look all that bad to me.
At Breissach I gained a new perspective on humanity. It was exactly one month before the Munich Pact for which Neville Chamberlain became infamous. The morning paper had announced that Hitler had sent an ultimatum to Czechoslovakia demanding the return of the Sudetenland. When we reached Breissach, we were told that there was a two-hour wait before we would be allowed to cross over to the French side of the Rhine to reach Colmar. And as we strolled through the town, we noticed that young men in SS uniform were everywhere, standing conspicuously in every doorway. Without exception they were blond, six feet tall or more, good-looking. They could easily have been taken for American college boys. So we asked one of them what was going on."Nur Ubung" was the answer:"just an excercise." We came to a road leading to a cathedral overlooking the Rhine. As we walked into a beer garden we were confronted by a man in plainclothes who came over to tell us in a civil manner that we could go no further. Why? Because they were" cleaning the cathedral." We laughed out loud, and so did he. They don't clean cathedrals in Germany, or anywhere else for that matter. Anyhow, we must not proceed. He was obviously Gestapo.
So we sat down in the beer garden, next to a low hedge beside the street. Moments later, a big open-topped Mercedes touring car fishtailed to a stop near us. Top brass in Wehrmacht uniforms stepped down and had the SS arrange everyone on the street (full of people as curious as we were) in a row opposite to where we sat. Blackshirted men stood at six-foot intervals beside our hedge watching the citizenry, hands on pistols. Why we, and a few others, were permitted to stay put is a puzzle. Everyone was aware that some big shot was coming, but we did not expect the man himself. Then Hitler came through, fanning his signature sloppy salute to the crowd, as his touring car drove up past the cathedral that was not being cleaned. There was no mistaking his beefsteak-red face and negligent demeanor. In preparation for the coming war he was inspecting the Rhine fortifications.
We sat quietly, not ten feet from him as he passed slowly by. I could not help thinking that if I had been armed I could have shot him. (Like many American boys of my generation, I had been given a rifle at an early age and shown how to use it on small unoffending animals.) No one had searched me or any other patron of the beer garden, though I assume that more than one SS man had us in his sights.
The point of this story, for me, however, is that I knew I was looking evil in the face. And it looked like my next-door neighbor or a friend of the family, perhaps a bit old-fashioned but solid. What Hitler was already doing to the Jews of Germany and Austria was no secret-although highly-placed officials of the United States government were content to look away and to complain about slanders directed against the German nation.(The American consul at Stuttgart, with whom I had subsequent dealings, was a blatant antisemite.) The part those fresh-faced, and, well, biddable, young men in black were playing was no secret, either. But they all looked so human and so everyday. Even the Gestapo agent could have been a stodgy chance-met tourist rather than a hard man or heavily-armed stooge.
Puritan theology began to make sense, in a way that shook me. I could not believe in the salvation of a few held out by John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards, but human depravity suddenly acquired a face, the cheerful mask that we all learn to wear as the price of belonging to a settled social order. I was still an atheist, as I am now, but that day in Breissach I became a Calvinist atheist. Human beings are capable of great good, but I know that the capacity for fathomless evil is equally human, and it wears a smiling face.
Quotes
By Edmund S. Morgan
"Eventually, to be sure, the course the Virginians charted for the United States proved the undoing of slavery. And a Virginia general gave up at Appomattox the attempt to support freedom with slavery. But were the two more closely linked than his conquerors could admit? Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black? Is America still colonial Virginia writ large? More than a century after Appomattox the questions linger." -- Edmund Morgan in"American Slavery, American Freedom"
About Edmund S. Morgan
For Morgan, who taught at Yale University from 1955 until his retirement in 1986, the release of a new volume on early America presented the opportunity to give readers a history lesson while critiquing the scholarship that provided him with a point of departure. The resulting collection is probably the best historiography and introduction to life in early America that one could imagine with each lesson presented in twenty or fewer pages of concise, insightful commentary. The Genuine Article's chapters, which cover nearly forty years of Morgan's reviews, describe most aspects of life in the colonies from the landing at Jamestown through the Revolution... Morgan reiterates this throughout, but, of even more value, he demonstrates what he professes through his reviews. The book's cover claims Morgan"has had a more profound role in shaping our perceptions of the American colonies" than any other living historian. The breadth and depth of the reviews included in this anthology confirm the claim. -- David Copeland reviewing"The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America"
Basic Facts
Teaching Positions:
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, instructor in social sciences, 1945-46;
Brown University, Providence, RI, assistant professor, 1946-49,
associate professor, 1949-51, professor of history, 1951-55;
Yale University, New Haven, CT, professor of history, 1955-65, Sterling Professor
of History, 1965-86, professor emeritus, 1986--.
Johnson Research Professor, University of Wisconsin, 1968-69.
Member of council, Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1953-56, 1958-60,
and 1970-72;
Trustee of Smith College, 1984- 89.
Area of Research: Puritan and American colonial history
Education:
Harvard University, A.B., 1937, Ph.D., 1942;
London School of Economics, University of London, graduate study, 1937- 38.
Major Publications:
Editor, Contributor, Joint Author:
Contributor to The Mirror of the Indian, Associates of the John Carter Brown Library, 1958. Author of introduction to Paul Revere's Three Accounts of His Famous Ride, (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1961, 2nd edition, 1968). Also contributor of articles and reviews to historical journals. Member of editorial board, New England Quarterly.
Awards:
National Humanities Medal, 2000;
National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, 2003, for Benjamin Franklin;
Organization of American Historians Distinguished Services Award, 1998;
Bruce Catton Award, 1992;
Columbia University's 1989 Bancroft Prize in American History for
Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America
(1988);
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. One year later, he became the first recipient of
the Douglas Adair Memorial Award for scholarship in early American history, and in
1986 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Historical
Association.
Douglass Adair Memorial Award, 1972;
William Clyde DeWane Medal, 1971;
Research fellow, Huntington Library, 1952-53.
Morgan has received numerous fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies
and the Social Science Research Council.
Morgan has received Honorary degrees from Rutgers University, Brown University,
Colgate University, Washington College, William and Mary, University of New Haven,
Williams College, Lawrence University, and Smith College.
Additional Info:
At Yale, Morgan has been a member of the Administrative Board of the Papers of
Benjamin Franklin for more than 30 years and has been its chairman for the last 11.
This documentary enterprise, sponsored by the American Philosophical Society and
Yale and now edited by Ellen R. Cohn, is in its final few years. It now has 36 volumes
and will eventually have about 46. In addition, the documents in all 46 volumes will be
available on a CD-ROM.The documents are of three kinds: letters and other
pieces written by Franklin, letters to Franklin, and other documents closely involving
Franklin.
Morgan is a member of the Society of American Historians, American Antiquarian
Society, Organization of American Historians (president, 1971-72), American
Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Connecticut Academy of
Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Historical Society, Colonial Society of Massachusetts,
British Academy, Royal Historical Society.
During World War II Morgan worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, as
a tool-and-die make in the Radiation Laboratory, (1942-45).
Morgan has been a professional woodturner for the past decade or so, working on large lathes and other equipment in the basement of his
home. His walnut bowls and other creations have been exhibited at the Creative Arts
Workshop in New Haven and at the League of New Hampshire Craftsman in New Hampshire,
where Morgan maintains a vacation home. He and his wife, Marie Morgan, have also
crafted tables and other furniture for their home in New Haven.