Last week we lost one of the titans of American history writing, Yale’s Edmund Morgan. His publishing career spanned an incredible sixty-five years from his first book (1944) to his last (2009). His topics ranged widely across colonial and Revolutionary American history, but if you have read anything by Morgan, it is likely The Puritan Dilemma, his biography of John Winthrop, still often used in history survey courses as a model of historical writing. An atheist, like his famous Harvard mentor Perry Miller, Morgan nevertheless took the Puritans’ religious ideas seriously. Morgan saw history as a craft rather than a vehicle for ideology or polemics, and he was simply one of the best academic prose stylists America has ever produced.
