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Samuel Eliot Morison: Historian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

P. A. M. Taylor
P. A. M. Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Hull
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Extract

Samuel Eliot Morison died in Boston in May 1976. He had been born there in 1887; he had spent much of his life in the Brimmer Street house his grandfather had built; and he could refer to Francis Parkman as “ my grandfather's friend.” I never met him; I have never discussed him with his colleagues and friends; and I do not propose writing a personal tribute. Rather, having re-read some four-fifths of the books he wrote, and perhaps nine-tenths of the words, I seek to describe his development, to explain why I judge him to be a great historian, and to show what manner of historian he chose to be.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 1977 , pp. 13 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Vistas of History (New York: 1964), p. 25Google Scholar. Unless otherwise noted, all works cited are by Morison himself. For early life at 44 Brimmer Street, see One Boy's Boston (Boston, 1962)Google Scholar.

2 The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765–1848, 2 vols. (Boston, 1913)Google Scholar. The revised edition (Boston, 1969) reduces the political detail while retaining personal and social matter in full.

3 The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 (Boston, 1921)Google Scholar.

4 The Oxford History of the United States, 1783–1917, 2 vols. (London, 1927)Google Scholar, is very thorough in its treatment of the years between 1790 and 1877, but devotes no more than 150 pages to the next forty years. The Growth of the American Republic, 2 vols. (New York, 1930, but I am here referring to the 1942 edition)Google Scholar, gives more than 200 pages to the Colonial period and the Revolution (and its pages are bigger), about the same as its predecessor to the years down to 1861, places rather less emphasis to the Civil War, but devotes over 300 pages to the later nineteenth century and another 300 to the twentieth, including chapters on economic and social topics.

5 Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston, 1930)Google Scholar; The Puritan Pronaos (New York, 1936, but I have used the Cornell University Press paperback edition of 1956, entitled The Intellectual Life, of Colonial New England)Google Scholar.

6 The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass., 1935)Google Scholar; Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936)Google Scholar; Vistas of History, p. 37.

7 Vistas of History, p. 39; Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge, Mass., 1936)Google Scholar, preface. The result is that Harvard lacks any thorough intellectual history, for the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, equal to George W. Pierson's work on Yale.

8 Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, 2 vols. (Boston, 1942)Google Scholar; Christopher Columbus (London, 1942)Google Scholar, the undocumented edition which I have used; Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1940)Google Scholar; Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; The Caribbean as Columbus Saw It (Boston, 1964)Google Scholar, as to which I venture the comment that some of the photographs are taken from too high an altitude to meet Morison's own criteria.

9 Vistas of History, pp. 30–36.

10 He even went on a patrol in a Navy blimp, The History of U.S. Naval Operations in the Second World War, 15 vols. (1947–1962), 1, 251Google Scholar note.

11 The Two-Ocean War (Boston, 1963).Google Scholar

12 Of Plymouth Plantation 1620–1647, by William Bradford (New York, 1952)Google Scholar; The Parkman Reader (Boston, 1955)Google Scholar; John Paul Jones, a Sailor's Biography (Boston, 1959)Google Scholar; “Old Bruin”: Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry (Boston, 1967).Google Scholar

13 The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages A.D. 500–1600 (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Samuel de Champlain, Father of New France (Boston, 1972)Google Scholar; The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages A.D. 1492–1616 (New York, 1974)Google Scholar. Here, the observations and photographs were used to establish landfalls; in the later work on Columbus they merely confirmed or modified what had been established from the sea. I must add that I have not tried to compile a full bibliography. Morison wrote learned articles and short popular books, not mentioned here. But for World War II, he would even have written, as a member of its corporation, a history of Boston's most ritualistic Episcopal church, which stands opposite 44 Brimmer Street — The Parish of the Advent in the City of Boston (Boston, 1944), foreword.Google Scholar

14 American Historical Review, 56 (01. 1951), 261–75.Google Scholar

15 Vistas of History, pp. 20–57.

16 Vistas of History, pp. 26–29. He makes much the same point in Christopher Columbus, p. xvi.

17 The Maritime History of Massachusetts, pp. 130–32, 370–73.

18 Christopher Columbus, Ch. xii (and The Southern Voyages, Ch. viii) and pp. 201, 402–3, 411, 460, 597–601.

19 John Paul Jones, Ch. xiii; “Old Bruin,” Ch. xii.

20 Naval Operations, 3, Ch. v; 5, 373; 13, 59–87; 9, 314 (the quotation). Others may single out Midway, or Saipan, or the light carriers' battle off Leyte, or Omaha beach.

21 Naval Operations, 12, Chs. i–vii. Similarly, the preparations for the Normandy landings occupy more than 70 pages in 9. Readers will detect, however, a gap, namely the logistic link between American industry and the forward bases. In Naval Operations, 1, ix, Morison explains that special studies were to be written by others. He means Carter, Worrall R., Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil and (with Elmer C. Duvall) Ships, Salvage, and Sinews of War (Washington, 1953, 1954)Google Scholar, the first treating the Pacific, the second the Atlantic and Mediterranean; and Furer, Julius A.Administration of The Navy Department in World War II (Washington, 1959)Google Scholar. Both Carter and Furer were rear-admirals.

22 For Brazil, see Portuguese Voyages, pp. 95–107; for Normandy, The Northern Voyages, Ch. viii.

23 For unions, Naval Operations, 1, 298–301, 373–74; the Air Force, 1, 237–47, 9, 16–17, 351; Anzio, 9, 336; the admirals, 4, 151–52, 158, 8, 251–56, 313–21, 12, 193–96, and more explicitly, The Two-Ocean War, pp. 581–82. One might add, at a lower level, the article “Did Roosevelt Start the War: History through a Beard,” Atlantic Monthly, 08. 1948, against Beard, Charles A.'s revisionism.Google Scholar

24 The Northern Voyages, pp. 66–79; The Southern Voyages, pp. 669–80, 687–89; Christopher Columbus, pp. 207–8, 224–25; Portuguese Voyages, pp. 27–29, 142 (the quotation), and Ch. ii, passim. In Columbus, too, may be found, p. 291, the following: “There never crossed the mind of Columbus or his fellow discoverers and conquistadors any other notion of relations between Spaniard and American Indian save that of master and slave.”

25 One example may suffice: Naval Operations, 10, preface.

26 Naval Operations, 2, 83.

27 Naval Operations, 1, ix–xi.

28 John Paul Jones, p. xi; Portuguese Voyages, p. 23 (he claims to be quoting masters of longdistance Portuguese fishing vessels); The Northern Voyages, p. ix.

29 Among others, the prefaces to Christopher Columbus, “Old Bruin”, and Samuel de Champlain may be cited. The Southern Voyages, p. xii, is in effect a brief obituary of Priscilla Barton Morison. Further examples of acknowledgments may be found in Naval Operations. In 7, xxix–xxxix, one assistant is quoted at length on the subject of life in a carrier during a Pacific operation. Both the preface to 14 and Rear-Admiral Eller's introduction to 15 make it clear how personal was Morison's control, though royalties went not to him but to a special fund for naval history research.

30 Naval Operations, 8, ix. I repeat that Morison's pages are much smaller than Roskill's, but the real difference in scale is very marked.

31 The Two-Ocean War, pp. 579–86.

32 See Andrews, K. R.' review of The Northern Voyages in William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 29 (01. 1972), 167–69.Google Scholar

33 Naval Operations, 1, ix–x.

34 Prange, Gordon, in American Historical Review, 55 (04. 1950), 642–45Google Scholar; 56 (07 1951), 928–31.

35 Naval Operations, 11, 4–7; 3, 62–79.

36 Naval Operations, 14, Ch. xxi.

37 Hudson, Winthrop S., “The Morison Myth concerning the Founding of Harvard College,” Church History, 8 (1939), 148–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jurgen Herbst, “The First Three American Colleges: Schools of the Reformation,” and McCaughey, Robert A., “The Transformation of American Academic Life: Harvard University 1821–1892,” Perspectives in American History, 8 (1974). 7–52, 239–332.Google Scholar

38 Vistas of History, p. 56.

39 Naval Operations, 4, 116–21 (the torpedo-bomber attack at Midway); 12, 178–83 (the loss of Princeton and disaster to rescue ship Birmingham); 13, 104–11 (kamikaze attacks in Lingayen Gulf); 14, 235–39 (Kamikaze attacks on picket-destroyers off Okinawa).

40 For another scholar's recognition of this, see Levin, David, History as Romantic Art (Stanford, 1959).Google Scholar

41 Vistas of History, p. 56.

42 Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Reynolds, Sian, 2 vols. (London, 1972)Google Scholar, preface to the first edition, 1949. Compare Vistas of History, pp. 27, 29.

43 Naval Operations, 14, xii. Morison's summer home at Northeast Harbor, Maine, bore the name Good Hope.