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4.5
Edmund Morgan, preeminent historian of the colonial and Revolutionary War eras, recently died (July 6, 2013). Bruce Kuklick had called him "arguably the finest living American historian". Back in the early 1970s, I occasionally sat in on his college lectures even though I neither was taking his course nor was I a history major - he was that good a lecturer. By way of personal tribute, I took down from the shelves and finally read one of his last books, THE GENUINE ARTICLE. It is a collection of Morgan's articles - nominally, book reviews - written for and originally published in the "New York Review of Books" (the majority from the 1990's, three as far back as the 1970's). But most are more than book reviews; they are learned yet lucid discussions of noteworthy topics or issues from American history.Most of the articles relate to three broad subjects: Part One - New Englanders (principally, the Puritans); Part Two - Southerners (principally, slavery and its legacy); Part Three - Revolutionaries. To give you an idea of the nature of matters discussed, my favorite pieces concern:(1) John Winthrop, America's first "great man", in the same category as Washington and Lincoln "and probably Franklin and Jefferson and maybe Franklin Delano Roosevelt and possibly even several more";(2) the role of sex among the Puritans, "the most self-conscious society we have ever known";(3) "The Big American Crime", which is the title to the article in which Morgan discusses how political and sociological agendas consciously or unconsciously shape every interpretation of what slavery did to slaves;(4) Benjamin Franklin; and(5) the debates between the Federalists and the Antifederalists concerning "The Great Political Fiction", i.e., the sovereignty of the people, "the fiction that the people are masters of their governors".Morgan slips in a few zingers. For example, in discussing the problems surrounding one hot topic among American historians (race prejudice), he mentions in passing "the 'postmodern' refusal to distinguish fact from fiction." Here's another: "Conservatism in America has been for the most part an intellectual desert. It has been too often a rear-guard, somewhat desperate and indiscriminate struggle against change, its spokesmen more stubborn than rational."Invariably, Morgan takes a broad view. For each book, he delves into the historical background of the central figure, event, or theory and usually he also discusses the book itself in the context of other scholarship and, going on to the long view, in the context of historiography. Although his knowledge is prodigious, he doesn't write like an academic. These are articles written primarily for an intelligent laity. And they are excellently written, as well. One of Morgan's younger colleagues once asked him how he wrote so well; Morgan replied, "Seven drafts, young man. Seven drafts." It shows.
