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Biography of Samuel Eliot MorisonName: Samuel Eliot MorisonBirth Date: July 9, 1887 Death Date: May 15, 1976 Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: historian Samuel Eliot Morison Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) was a leading American naval historian, biographer, and historian of Puritanism.Samuel Eliot Morison was born in Boston on July 9, 1887, into a prominent family with deep roots in the Massachusetts past. He attended Harvard, obtaining his doctorate in 1912. There he derived the precept of history as a literary art. His dissertation, concerning Harrison Gray Otis, an ancestor whose papers were in Morison's attic, was sympathetic to the old Federalist.In 1915 Morison joined the faculty at Harvard. His Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 (1921) earned him considerable fame. The book traced broad social and economic trends in Massachusetts up to the Civil War. While at Harvard he also served on the American Commission to Negotiate Peace between 1918 and 1919 and was one of the key individuals responsible for drafting the Versailles Treaty. Morison became the first Harmsworth professor of American history at Oxford in 1922, a position he held until his return …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…relativism. His H.G. Otis: Urbane Federalist (1969) marked a return to the subject of his doctoral dissertation. In The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (1971) he describes the voyages up to the early 17th century.In 1964 Morison received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He remained an active proponent of history until his death in 1976. Further Reading Morison's own writings provide insights into his life and professional career. His One Boy's Boston, 1887-1901 (1962) tells as much about Morison as about Boston, and in Vistas of History (1964) he discusses his professional experiences. This work also contains a comprehensive bibliography of Morison's writings to 1964. His historical work is discussed in Michael Kraus, A History of American History (1937) and The Writing of American History (1953). See also John Higham and others, History (1965), and Robert Allen Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (1966). |