Historian Edmund S. Morgan

By Matt Schudel, Wednesday, July 10, 6:51 PME-mail the writer Edmund S. Morgan, a renowned historian whose books on Puritanism and colonial life offered new perspectives on the nation’s founding, and who published a best-selling biography of Benjamin Franklin at age 86, died July 8 at a hospital in New Haven, Conn. He was 97.

He had pneumonia, his wife, Marie Morgan, told the Associated Press.



( “No matter what people say, history doesn’t repeat itself,” historian Edmund S. Morgan told an interviewer. Dr. Morgan, a longtime professor at Yale University, published more than 15 books on early American history during a career that spanned more than 60 years.

Dr. Morgan, a longtime professor at Yale University, published more than 15 books on early American history during a career that spanned more than 60 years.

He wrote incisively about the conditions that led to the American Revolution, including the ethos of New England’s Puritans, the slave-owning culture of Virginia and the leadership of George Washington and other Founding Fathers.

Dr. Morgan won many of the major awards for historians, including the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize and, in 2006, a special Pulitzer Prize for his body of work. Several of his books, such as “The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789” (1956) and “The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop” (1958) were republished through the years and widely used in college courses. His most recent book, “American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America,” appeared in 2009.

“Over a long and fruitful career,” historian Pauline Maier wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1988, “he has been one of the most influential historians of early America, a man with a rare gift for telling the story of the past simply and elegantly without sacrificing its abundant complexity.”

Dr. Morgan said he was drawn to the element of surprise in history, and from his first book — “The Puritan Family” (1944) — he challenged many long-held beliefs. Among other things, he showed that the Puritans had a healthy interest in sex, despite their reputation for dour rectitude.

In 2002, Dr. Morgan had an unexpected bestseller with his biography of Franklin. Writing in an inviting, aphoristic style, he looked beyond Franklin’s famous kite and bifocal spectacles to reveal a serious, thoughtful man who was colonial America’s most respected international figure.

“With a wisdom about himself that comes only to the great of heart,” Dr. Morgan wrote, “Franklin knew how to value himself and what he did without mistaking himself for something more than one man among many. His special brand of self-respect required him to honor his fellow men and women no less than himself.”

In 1975, Dr. Morgan published perhaps his most controversial book, “American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” which he called a study of “the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom.”

The book, which won the Francis Parkman Prize, argued that Virginia plantation owners exerted an outsized influence on colonial thought. They sought freedom of British rule, at least in part, to maintain the economic benefits of slavery.

“Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one,” Dr. Morgan wrote.

“How heavily did American economic opportunity and political freedom rest on Virginia’s slaves?” Dr. Morgan asked, in a series of increasingly pointed rhetorical questions. “Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black? Is America still colonial Virginia writ large?”