The Magazine

Early Americans

Shrewd observations on wisdom about the past.

Jan 4, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 16 • By JAMES BOWMAN
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American Heroes

Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America

by Edmund S. Morgan

Norton, 304 pp., $27.95

Edmund S. Morgan, the Sterling professor of history emeritus at Yale, must surely know more about American colonial history in New England than any man alive. The author of numerous previous volumes, including The Puritan Family, The Puritan Dilemma, The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89, and The Challenge of the American Revolution, Morgan has now, aged 93, put together a book of his essays titled to stand as the culmination of his career and a compendium of wisdom gleaned from a very long lifetime spent in the study of history in the old-fashioned sense--that is, history as an attempt to understand the past rather than to impose the historian's ideology upon it.

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