| This dissertation examines the first thirty years of the scholarly career of historian Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976). From 1912 to 1942, Morison produced over a dozen volumes of history on the early national period, maritime affairs, Anglo-American relations, the history of Harvard, Puritanism, and Columbus, which reveal his development as an historian and his importance to American historiography. The author analyzes these works, demonstrating how each developed from Morison's personal needs as a scholar and the intellectual needs of his professional and lay readers.;The author describes the mature Morison of 1942 as a study in contrasts. Morison was a social and intellectual historian of far-reaching literary abilities, who borrowed from the "humanistic" tradition of his mentors without rejecting the institutional models they found repugnant. He disavowed political purposes in writing, yet too freely expressed his opinions on political matters. He took pride in professionalism and sought to disassociate himself from amateurs, but he wrote as much for a nonscholarly as a scholarly audience. These contrasts, the author argues, derived from Morison's attempt to forge a compromise between two types of historical writing--the amateur, men-of-letters tradition of narrative historian, Francis Parkman, and the professional, academic tradition of his Harvard associates. The effort to straddle two intellectual worlds defined both the usefulness and limitations of Morison's work, but the struggle was recognized as "heroic" by historians in both camps, who proclaimed him "the dean of American historians" at the time of his death in 1976.;The substance and style of Morison's early works emerged from his personal and professional relationships with other historical thinkers, including Charles Homer Haskins, George Santayana, Albert Bushnell Hart, Albert Beveridge, Edward Channing, Frederick Jackson Turner, James Truslow Adams, Van Wyck Brooks, William B. Goodwin, and Charles McLean Andrews. Using the personal papers of these scholars as well as the rich Morison collection at the Harvard Archives, the author demonstrates how Morison's colleagues influenced his attitudes about institutional versus social approaches to history, political and public purposes in writing, obligations to academic advisors, professional and amateur identities, and the proper form of historical writing. He then traces how these attitudes were invested in the structure, style, narrative voice, and thematic content of each of Morison's early works. |
