How not to learn about the American past
In the mid-1940s, Edmund S. Morgan, a mild-mannered young
historian, was teaching at Brown and making a name in the quiet field of early
American studies. Having published a slim, well-received collection of essays
on the New England Puritans, he might have seemed the very model of the
unassuming scholar at the outset of a modest career, satisfied to refine the
work of great forebears in a narrow field. That wasn’t Edmund Morgan. The
Second World War was over. The United States was developing an energetic
vision, which would come to fruition in 1960 with the election of John F.