Edmund Sears Morgan

Edmund Morgan, an award-winning and prolific historian of early America, died on July 8, 2013. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, majoring in American history and literature under the tutelage of eminent historian Perry Miller. He earned his B.A. in 1937, after which he attended the London School of Economics, returning to Harvard to earn his doctorate in the history of American civilization, again under Perry Miller’s direction, which he completed in 1942. 

He began his teaching career at the University of Chicago, followed by a period at Brown University. He eventually settled at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986 and remained emeritus professor of history after his retirement. He is best known for the clarity and elegance of his writing style and his influential works on the domestic and intellectual lives of Puritans, such as The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (1944) and The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958). Perhaps his most influential work arose out of his turn away from Puritan New England toward the southern colonies. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia has shaped countless scholarly careers since its publication in 1975, when its assertion of the duality between slavery and liberty at the heart of the colonial American experience troubled some of the celebratory tone of the nation’s bicentennial. General audiences came to know Edmund Morgan best through one of his latest works, a lively biography of Benjamin Franklin published in 2002. Edmund Morgan’s work, both as an instructor in the classroom and as a scholar, was recognized many times over. Among his awards were the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa’s William Clyde DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching and scholarship in 1971, the Francis Parkman Prize for American Slavery, American Freedom in 1976, and the Bancroft Prize in 1989 for Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988). He was also presented with the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton in 2000, and received a Special Citation Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his entire body of work. He was the longest-tenured living member of AAS at the time of his death.