Ignorant but interested

If Americans of a certain age know anything about Puritanism, it is probably because they read something by the (atheist) historian Edmund S. Morgan, the great Yale scholar who died July 8. His book The Puritan Dilemma—which used the life of John Winthrop to describe the Puritans’ religious and political project in America—was widely assigned in high schools and colleges. 

I had the good fortune decades ago to take a graduate class from Morgan on American colonial history. At the time, humanities professors were dazzling people with their theoretical vocabulary—Marxist, Freudian or deconstructionist—and Morgan seemed quite old-fashioned in his methods, patiently wading through primary texts and asking straightforward questions.

A historian’s job, Morgan showed, is to ask questions about primary sources that are 1) interesting and 2) answerable on the basis of the primary sources. This is a lot harder than it sounds—or at least it was hard for me. Morgan was a genius at it. He was also a brilliantly clear writer.