Morgan, Edmund S(ears) 1916-

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MORGAN, Edmund S(ears) 1916-

PERSONAL: Born January 17, 1916, in Minneapolis, MN; son of Edmund Morris (a professor of law) and Elsie (Smith) Morgan; married Helen Mayer (an historian), June 7, 1939; married Marie Caskey (an historian), June 22, 1983; children: (first marriage) Penelope, Pamela. Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1937, Ph.D., 1942; London School of Economics, University of London, graduate study, 1937-38. Hobbies and other interests: Woodturning.

ADDRESSES: Home—244 Livingston St., New Haven, CT 06511. Office—Department of History, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520.

CAREER: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, instrument maker in Radiation Laboratory, 1942-45; 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.

MEMBER: 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.

AWARDS, HONORS: Research fellow, Huntington Library, 1952-53; William Clyde DeWane Medal, 1971; Douglass Adair Memorial Award, 1972; Bruce Catton Award, 1992; Organization of American Historians Distinguished Services Award, 1998; National Humanities Medal, 2000; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, 2003, for Benjamin Franklin; 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.

WRITINGS:

The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, Boston Public Library (Boston, MA), 1944, new edition, Harper (New York, NY), 1966.

Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century, Colonial Williamsburg (Williamsburg, VA), 1952.

(With Helen M. Morgan) The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1953, 3rd edition, 1994.

The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1956, 3rd edition, 1992.

The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1958.

The American Revolution: A Review of Changing Interpretations, Service Center for Teachers of History (Washington, DC), 1958.

The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1962, reprinted, Norton (New York, NY), 1984.

(With others) The National Experience: A History of the United States, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1963.

Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1963.

(With others) The Emergence of the American, Educational Services, 1965.

Roger Williams: The Church and the State, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1967.

So What about History?, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1969.

American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, Norton (New York, NY), 1975.

The Challenge of the American Revolution, Norton (New York, NY), 1976.

The Meaning of Independence: John Adams, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1976, 2nd edition, 2004.

The Genius of George Washington, Norton (New York, NY), 1980.

Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, Norton (New York, NY), 1988.

Benjamin Franklin, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2002.

The Genuine Article, Norton (New York, NY), 2004.

EDITOR

Prologue to the Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764-1766, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1959.

The Founding of Massachusetts: Historians and the Sources, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1964.

The American Revolution: Two Centuries of Interpretation, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1965.

Puritan Political Ideas, 1558-1794, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1965, 2nd edition, Hackett Publishing, 2003.

The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653-1657: The Conscience of a Puritan, Harper (New York, NY), 1965.

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.

SIDELIGHTS: Described by Michael Kammen in the Washington Post Book World as "one of the most distinguished historians of the United States," Edmund S. Morgan is the author of over fifteen books that 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. With works such as The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, and Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, 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."

Much of Morgan's acclaim has resulted from not only his ideas, but also his attention to the lives of human beings. In an essay for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, William D. Liddle explained that "Morgan's writings generally exhibit an affinity for people, a preoccupation with the details of their daily lives, and a concern for even the most mundane events and experiences when they touch upon things human. Attracted to the concrete and averse to abstractions, Morgan traces the history of ideas in their specific settings." In the opinion of Pauline Maier in the New York Times Book Review, he is "a man with a rare gift for telling the story of the past simply and elegantly without sacrificing its abundant complexity." Morgan has been able to reach wide audiences "by writing in language distinguished by simplicity, precision, grace, and wry humor. To achieve clarity and resonance he assumes that his audience is brighter than he is but completely ignorant of his subject and therefore dependent on the information he makes available. With Morgan, this is a formula for writing remarkable history," Liddle asserted. Because of this, Morgan's work appeals to audiences as diverse as Harvard scholars and the junior high school students who have read his So What about History?

Morgan's ideas have sparked lively debates for more than forty years. "The intellectual history of the American Revolutionary era was rewritten by scholars who followed the path marked out by Edmund S. Morgan," Liddle noted. For Liddle, Morgan's achievement is singular because the historian has never made such an influence his goal. "There is no 'Morgan thesis' on the American Revolution or on any other subject, and there is no 'Morgan school' either," Liddle added. "As he never became a disciple, so he never sought disciples."

Morgan's influence has been particularly strong in the study of the early Puritans, the subject of the historian's first book, The Puritan Family: Essays on Religionand Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, published in 1944, and of many that followed. "Rarely have the Puritans emerged from modern scholarship as more human figures than in these writings," Liddle claimed. Liddle called The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, first published in 1958, "a beautifully written volume," later adding: "Perhaps the book's most conspicuous and characteristic feature is the human touch with which its author treats complex beliefs and ideas."

Morgan returned to America's earlier history in his 1962 biography The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795, a work that illuminates the man whose writings Morgan had often used as source material for his own. For historians, Maier wrote, the book is "the inside favorite" among Morgan's works. In 1963, he published Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea, which explained Puritan thought in the light of their policies toward church membership.

Morgan's writings on the Revolutionary War are considered integral to an understanding of the early United States. Among those books considered most important is The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, written with Morgan's first wife, Helen M. Morgan, and published in 1953. Using a method that Liddle noted "has been described as seeking 'historical objectivity through cumulative partiality,'" Morgan looks at what had not previously been considered a significant British/colonist conflict in the instigation of the American Revolution, the Stamp Act, and reveals its importance through the eyes of six of its major figures. In this respect, Morgan's methods are considered revolutionary as well.

American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia is, in Liddle's opinion, "arguably Morgan's most important book; it is unquestionably his most controversial work." The book argues that it was the practice of owning slaves that spurred Virginians to want to be free of the British, in turn paving the way for revolution. "When Virginians became remarkably eloquent about the threat of 'slavery' and the danger to their 'liberties' in new British measures of the 1760s and 1770s, Morgan saw in their rhetoric a vital link between the very real freedom they enjoyed, the bondage they imposed on others, and 'a conglomeration of republican ideas' from which the ideology of Revolution was drawn," Liddle explained. Maier admired the "hilarious comparison of Indians with the barbarous Englishmen of seventeenth-century Virginia," and wrote that the book "will delight anyone with a taste for the human comedy and good writing."

In The Genius of George Washington, published in 1980, Morgan's analysis of the first president is backed up by excerpts from his subject's own letters. According to the Atlantic Monthly, Morgan's thesis is that Washington's true acumen lay in his "superb understanding of power," a side of the first president that had not previously been widely explored, and one that is reinforced by Washington's personal correspondence.

Morgan's Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America received a great deal of attention from critics and colleagues alike. Morgan's study of what he describes as the "political fictions" behind the notion of government by representation, Inventing the People argues that it was James Madison's fear of diversity leading to division that led him to "invent" the "fiction" of the "one people" upon which the U.S. Constitution is based. Samuel H. Beer commented in the New Republic that the problem was one of size: "On the one hand, as Morgan observes, the country was already so far united that its government had to be conducted [in Morgan's words,] 'in terms of a whole continent.' On the other hand, because of the weakness of the federal authority under the Articles of Confederation, the forces of localism dominated at the center as well as the periphery. How to overcome localism, [Morgan] says, was 'the central problem' confronting the aspiration for self-government." According to Kammen, the power of the book is that it explores the roots of "American notions concerning governmental power: where it actually lies, where we prefer to believe it ultimately resides and how the relationship between those two—fact and fiction—shapes our perception of political representation." As such, Inventing the People provoked a wide range of responses.

In the New York Review of Books, Keith Thomas contended that in Inventing the People, Morgan neglects to consider several other historical examples (including the French Revolution) of the developments of the same "fictions" that Morgan considers peculiar to the birth of the United States. However, Thomas wrote that when Morgan leaves off what the critic sees as the author's dependence on the work of other historians, he "puts forward original arguments of his own. In a series of brilliant chapters he probes the myths that sustained eighteenth-century American notions of liberty, and he reveals in each case the huge gulf between the high-sounding platitudes and the brutal realities of political life." Kammen called Inventing the People "a creative synthesis of considerable significance." Despite concerns that the historian may have overstated the extent to which colonists were devoted to the idea of equality at the time of the Revolution, Kammen assessed that Morgan has "made a penetrating contribution to our understanding of the origins of American political culture."

In 2002, Morgan published Benjamin Franklin, "the best short biography of Franklin ever written," according to T. J. Schaeper in Library Journal. Morgan's version of Franklin's life focuses on the Founding Father's desire to lead a "useful life," beyond his financial and scientific achievements. This desire led Franklin into public service, which he saw as a way to give his life a meaning beyond the strictly personal. Relying on Franklin's writings, and on his own extensive knowledge of the scholarship already published on Franklin, Morgan tries to capture the essence of Franklin's way of thought. Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs called Morgan's book "a concise, excellent, and eminently readable biography." The critic for Publishers Weekly believed that "this wonderful biography of an extraordinary man results from a perfect marriage of subject and scholar."