Volume 51, Number 11 · June 24, 2004
Lessons of a Master
By Garry Wills
The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America
by Edmund S. Morgan
Norton, 315 pp., $26.95
Americans have been learning from Edmund Morgan for many decades—not only the distinguished historians he has trained at Yale, or other historians, but the reading public at large. He is the clearest of writers. He can put complex matters in ways that make misunderstanding him almost impossible. I learned much about American individualism from his account of the private conversion experience in Congregational churches.[1] I never saw the brilliance of George Washington's neutrality policy until I read his 1977 George Rogers Clark Lecture.[2] The history of Virginia comes alive in his paradoxical book on slavery.[3] He continues prolific to this day, having published in 2002 a survey of all Benjamin Franklin's published and unpublished writings.[4] Now he gives us a collection of his review-articles in these pages, in what he calls 'a kind of intellectual autobiography.'
Review, 3526 words
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