Edmund Morgan

Edmund Sears Morgan (January 17, 1916 – July 8, 2013) was a professor of history at Yale University between 1955 and 1986.

His scholarship ranged across American history in the 17th and 18th centuries, focusing especially on the American 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 earned his PhD at Harvard University in 1942 where he studied under Perry Miller. He began by teaching at the University of Chicago (1945-46) and then at Brown University (1946-55) before being called to Yale. In 1965, Morgan was appointed a Sterling Professor, Yale's highest distinctions. Morgan was awarded the 2000 National Humanities Medal "for his brilliant scholarship as one of America's most distinguished historians ... [who] has enhanced our understanding of American colonial history by challenging traditions and assumptions about the birth of our nation and by bringing to life the people and ideas that shaped America's destiny." He was for many years the Chair of the Board of Editors of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 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."

Yale University has endowed the Edmund S. Morgan chair of African American Studies, History, and American Studies.

For a short bibliography of Morgan's scholarship and sources about Morgan see the bibliography page.

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