American Slavery, American Freedom

Author Bio: Edmund S. Morgan

Edmund Sears Morgan, an eminent authority on early American history, was a professor of history at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986. He specialized in American colonial history, with some attention to English history, and was noted for his incisive writing style. In 1971 he was awarded the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa’s William Clyde DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching and scholarship, considered one of the most prestigious teaching prizes for Yale faculty. In 1972 he became the first recipient of the Douglass Adair Memorial Award for scholarship in early American history, and in 1986 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Historical Association. He became a Sterling Professor, one of Yale’s highest distinctions, in 1965. He received the Gold Medal for History from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, and he was awarded the 2000 National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton for “extraordinary contributions to American cultural life and thought.” In 2006, he won a special Pulitzer Prize citing “a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century.”