Edmund Morgan
Edmund Sears Morgan (b. January 17, 1916, in Minneapolis, Minnesota), historian specializing in American (and British) history before 1800. Morgan Professor of History emeritus at Yale University (1955-1986.) His books range across American history in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially on the Revolution, Puritan New England and the slave South. He uses intellectual, social, biographical and political history approaches. In British history he wrote 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. His study of colonial Virginia American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) won numerous awards for its depth of research, clarity of language, and cogency of argument about why Virginia adopted both slavery (for blacks) and freedom (for whites). Two early books, Birth of the Republic (1956) and The Puritan Dilemma (1958), have long been required reading in many undergraduate history courses. He has written biographies of Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams, and Benjamin Franklin.
Morgan became a Sterling Professor, Yale's highest distinctions, in 1965. Morgan was awarded the 2000 National Humanities Medal 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." [1]
Morgan's own interest in history grew while he attended Belmont Hill School, a prep school near Boston, and while he was an undergraduate at Harvard College, where he went on to earn his Ph.D in 1942. At Harvard Morgan studied under Perry Miller. He began by teaching at the University of Chicago (1945-46) and then at Brown University (1946-55) before becoming a professor at Yale.
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 National Experience: A History of the United States (1963) coauthor of this 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 (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)
- The Genius of George Washington (1980)
- The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795 (1984)
- 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
Reference
- 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