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Edmund Sears Morgan (January 17, 1916 – July 8, 2013) was an American historian and an 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.

Early life and education

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, when their father was appointed a professor at Harvard Law School.

Morgan attended Belmont Hill School in Belmont, Massachusetts, and then enrolled at Harvard College, where he initially intended 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. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1937. Then, at the urging of the jurist and family friend Felix Frankfurter, Morgan began attending lectures at the London School of Economics.

In 1942, Morgan earned his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University with Miller as his adviser.

Military service

Although a pacifist, Morgan became convinced after the fall of France in June 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.

Personal life and death

In 1939, he married Helen Theresa Mayer, who died in 1982.

Morgan died in New Haven, Connecticut 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.

Career

In 1946–55, Morgan taught history at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island before becoming a professor at Yale University, where he directed some 60 PhD dissertations in colonial history before retiring in 1986.

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 wrote a biography of Benjamin Franklin in which he made extensive use of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. He also wrote biographies on Ezra Stiles and Roger Williams.

Puritans

Morgan's trio The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in 17th-Century New England (1944), The Puritan Dilemma (1958), and Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (1963) restored the intellectual respectability of the Puritans, and revealed their appetite for healthy sex, causing a renaissance in Puritan studies, partly because both Morgan and his mentor Miller were Ivy League atheist professors, which added to their credibility. Visible Saints, dedicated to Miller, was a reinterpretation of the Puritan ideal of the "Church of the Elect."

Morgan argued that the criterion for church membership was not fixed in England. Soon after their arrival in the Colonies, the Puritans restricted membership to a gathered church composed exclusively of tested Saints.

Morgan's 1958 book The Puritan Dilemma raised his status in the public consciousness, and the book became the most assigned textbook in U.S. history survey courses, documenting the change in understanding among Puritans of what it means to be a member of a church. Morgan described the Puritan as "doing right in a world that does wrong...Caught between the ideals of God's Law and the practical needs of the people, John Winthrop walked a line few could tread."