Search results for ""author edmund s. morgan""

"This book amounts to an intellectual autobiography....These pieces are thus a statement of what I have thought about early Americans during nearly seventy years in their company," writes historian Edmund S. Morgan in the introduction to this landmark collection. The Genuine Article gathers together twenty-five of Morgan's finest essays over forty years, commenting brilliantly on everything from Jamestown to James Madison. In revealing the private lives of "Those Sexy Puritans" and "The Price of Honor" on Southern plantations, The Genuine Article details the daily lives of early Americans, along with "The Great Political Fiction" that continues to this day. As one of our most celebrated historians, Morgan's characteristic insight and penetrating wisdom are not to be missed in this extraordinarily rich portrait of early America and its Founding Fathers.

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In this unique collection, noted historian Edmund Morgan focuses upon three ideas that lay at the root of Puritan political theory and have had a continuing significance in our history: calling, covenant, and the separate spheres of church and state. The selections show the origin of these ideas in the writings of the early English Puritans before the colonization of America, in seventeenth century New England, and finally in new contexts in the eighteenth century. One may read these documents as primary sources of Puritan thought per se, as sources of American intellectual history, or as sources of a political theory that flowered in the early years of the new constitutional republic. --from the Foreword

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In this unique collection, noted historian Edmund Morgan focuses upon three ideas that lay at the root of Puritan political theory and have had a continuing significance in our history: calling, covenant, and the separate spheres of church and state. The selections show the origin of these ideas in the writings of the early English Puritans before the colonization of America, in seventeenth century New England, and finally in new contexts in the eighteenth century. One may read these documents as primary sources of Puritan thought per se, as sources of American intellectual history, or as sources of a political theory that flowered in the early years of the new constitutional republic. --from the Foreword

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In the American Revolution, Virginians were the most eloquent spokesmen for freedom and quality. George Washington led the Americans in battle against British oppression. Thomas Jefferson led them in declaring independence. Virginians drafted not only the Declaration but also the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they were elected to the presidency of the United States under that Constitution for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of its existence. They were all slaveholders. In the new preface Edmund S. Morgan writes: "Human relations among us still suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our predecessors. The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time. How republican freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite, slavery, is the subject of this book. American Slavery, American Freedom is a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. Morgan finds the keys to this central paradox, "the marriage of slavery and freedom," in the people and the politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the Revolution and the largest slaveholding state in the country.

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In 1957, the University of Chicago Press asked acclaimed best-selling historian Daniel J. Boorstin to oversee a series of accessible yet authoritative books that, together, would tell the whole history of the American people. The result, published over the course of nearly half a century, is the "Chicago History of American Civilization" series, which provides a nuanced and vibrant portrait of the United States from its inception through the twentieth century. Scholars across many disciplines contributed, and the series covers a broad range of topics, as disparate as the War of 1812, immigration, and American folklore. While the series is certainly eclectic, the books share both ambition and authority - they have been staples for teachers and general readers alike. The authors included in this series represent some of the greatest academic talents ever to turn their mind to the American past. Thus the University of Chicago Press is excited to offer new editions of three of the series' best-known books. In "The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89", Edmund S. Morgan shows how the challenge of British taxation started Americans on a search for constitutional principles to protect their freedom, and eventually led to the Revolution. By demonstrating that the founding fathers' political philosophy was not grounded in theory, but rather grew out of their own immediate needs, Morgan paints a vivid portrait of how the founders' own experiences shaped their passionate convictions, and these in turn were incorporated into the Constitution and other governmental documents. "The Birth of the Republic" is the classic account of the beginnings of the American government, and in this fourth edition the original text is supplemented with a new foreword by Joseph J. Ellis and a historiographic essay by Rosemarie Zagarri.

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