Edmund Sears Morgan, 1916–2013; Photo: Michael Marsland/Yale University
Edmund Sears Morgan, a Sterling Professor of American History Emeritus at Yale University, died on Monday, July 8, 2013 at the age of ninety-seven. The news brought me back to a September afternoon in 1974 when I entered upon what, in retrospect, would be the single most formative experience of my professional life. Along with eight or nine other first-year graduate students, I took my seat at the long seminar table in Mr. Morgan’s (as he then was to us) book-filled office in Yale’s Hall of Graduate Studies to begin his legendary seminar in American Colonial History. A bottle of sherry and some plastic glasses soon materialized on the table (to my recollection, it was Harvey’s Shooting Sherry), as did photocopies of a document written in Elizabethan court hand. We spent the rest of the afternoon learning to translate that treacherous and heavily abbreviated script. It was Ed’s way of introducing us to the craft of a professional historian, which, in his view, meant staying close to the primary sources and letting the past speak for itself.
As Princeton’s John Murrin has written, the seminar was an “intellectual delight.” Over its course, we graduated from small research projects to presenting a full-fledged paper—the presenter responsible for the week’s sherry and rewarded with a private conference with Ed. Along the way, we were continually dazzled by Ed’s command of every aspect of colonial history from Puritan
