Edmund S. Morgan

Edmund Sears Morgan was an American historian and an eminent authority on early American history. He was the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986. He specialized in American colonial history, with some attention to English history. Thomas S. Kidd says he was noted for his incisive writing style, "simply one of the best academic prose stylists America has ever produced." 

He covered many topics, including Puritanism, political ideas, the American Revolution, slavery, historiography, family life, and numerous notables such as Benjamin Franklin. Morgan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the second child of Edmund Morris Morgan and Elsie Smith Morgan. His mother was from a Yankee family that practiced Christian Science, though she distanced herself from that faith. 

His father, descended from Welsh coal miners, taught law at the University of Minnesota. His sister was Roberta Mary Morgan (later Wohlstetter), also a historian and, like Edmund, a winner of the Bancroft Prize. In 1925 the family moved from Washington, D.C. to Arlington, Massachusetts to allow the father to take a position as professor at Harvard Law School.

Morgan attended Belmont Hill School near home. He then enrolled in Harvard College, intending to study English history and literature, but after taking a course in American literature with F. O. Matthiessen he switched to the new major of American civilization (history and literature), with Perry Miller as his tutor, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1937. Then, at the urging of the jurist Felix Frankfurter (a family friend), Morgan attended lectures at the London School of Economics.

Returning to Harvard, in 1942 Morgan earned his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization, with Miller as his adviser. Although a pacifist, Morgan became convinced after the fall of France in 1940 that only military force could stop Hitler, and he withdrew his application for conscientious objector status. During World War II he trained as a machinist at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he turned out parts for radar installations.

In 1946–55 Morgan taught history at Brown University before becoming a professor at Yale University, where he directed some 60 PhD dissertations in colonial history before retiring in 1986. In 1939 he married Helen Theresa Mayer, who died in 1982. Morgan died in New Haven on July 8, 2013 at the age of 97. His cause of death was pneumonia. He was survived by two daughters—Penelope Aubin and Pamela Packard—from his first marriage; his second wife, Marie (née Carpenter) Caskey Morgan, a historian; six grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Morgan was profoundly influenced by historian Perry Miller, who became a lifelong friend. Although both were atheists, they had a deep understanding and respect for Puritan religion. From Miller, Morgan learned to appreciate: The intellectual rigor and elegance of a system of ideas that made sense of human life in a way no longer palatable to most of us. Certainly not palatable to me... He left me with a habit of taking what people have said at face value unless I find compelling reasons to discount it... What Americans said from the beginning about taxation and just government deserved to be taken as seriously as the Puritans' ideas about God and man.

Morgan's many books and articles covered a range of topics in the history of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, using intellectual, social history, biographical, and political history approaches. Two of his early books, The 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. 

Morgan has written a biography of Benjamin Franklin of which he made extensive use of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin and has written about at length. He has also written biographies on Ezra Stiles and Roger Williams.