a totally inappropriate title ( )

This was my first Edmund Morgan book and I enjoyed it thoroughly. He is clearly an academic, his writing is somewhat weighty and took me a little longer to read than other history books.

American Heroes is a collection of essays which span about six decades of authorship; there are several themes from the '40s and 50's, one from as recent as 2005 and a couple of previously unpublished pieces. The notions of American "heroes" span pre-colonial times and discuss the travels of Christopher Columbus and ends with modern pieces highlighting George Washington and Ben Franklin. He includes several essays dealing with witchcraft and others dispelling myths regarding the Puritans. Less interesting for me was an essay detailing the differences in leadership between Timothy Dwight and his predecessor, Ezra Stiles as presidents of Yale in 1795. Morgan's 30-page biography of William Penn primarily delves into Penn's religious beliefs and the basis of Quakerism.

A point of contention I have with some other reviews of this book and those like it (essay collections of historical figures) is the bemoaning of the "biographies" being "too short" or not being "in depth." What does one expect from a two- to three-hundred page book? These essays provide a great deal of information as well as providing the reader an idea if a topic or person would be of more interest. As well, I likely would never have heard of either Giles Corey or Mary Easty; a man and women executed during the witch trials of the mid to late seventeenth century. I couldn't possibly imagine how thick this book would be if everyone discussed within its covers were given an exhaustive biography each!

Not short on information or research, this book contains essays which can be long winded or just too lengthy for subject matter of little interest to me; as for the topics of interest, the depth of the essays are great. ( )

Could have been great but didn't really cover 'heros'. It was a bunch of his lectures strung together ( )

In my estimation, Edmund Morgan is one of the finest American historians of his or any other generation and I have read a number of his earlier books. Morgan is now 93 years old, so I was surprised to see a new book from him on the shelves. And of course, it turns out that the book is a collection of essays written over the past many years. Most of the pieces have been previously published. So, now you are forewarned. How much that matters depends in part on how much you enjoy reading Edmund Morgan, that rarest of birds, an academic historian who can tell a good story elegantly and simply, but not simplistically.

Many of the essays trace familiar ground from Morgan’s works on early America. For example, his elucidation of the Puritans as more complicated and interesting than you probably think is familiar to readers of [[ASIN:0321478061 The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Library of American Biography)]]. Likewise, his views on James Madison’s invention of the American people and thus created an American popular sovereignty that were developed in [[ASIN:0393306232 Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America]].

His essay Dangerous Books, while it may be familiar to a few readers of [[ASIN:0393301265 Gentle Puritan]] (judging by the absence of any ratings or reviews I’m guessing that number is very small), was new to me and worth the price of admission by itself. Morgan uses the life of Ezra Stiles at Yale (first as student, later as president) to extol the importance of libraries – and their danger to entrenched belief. Morgan’s easy and elegant writing is on display: “It was probably inevitable that Ezra Stiles, placed in reach of the Yale Library, would sooner or later arrive at a number of heretical ideas." Stiles "read himself to the edge of deism with Shaftesbury and then tried to read himself back again...It might seem therefore that Ezra Stiles fully recovered from his bout with the library.” But Stiles believed that truth would prevail when it came "forth in the open Field and dispute the matter on an equal Footing….only tyrants need fear the truth."

Morgan concludes, "Ezra Stiles was, as you can see, a dangerous man. But the danger lay less in his own radical views than in the freedom he wanted for others, the freedom to read and from reading to think and speak the thoughts that dissolve old institutions and create new ones. That kind of freedom is as dangerous today [1959] as it was then. If we allow young men and women to read and think, we must expect that their thoughts will not be our thoughts and that they will violate much that we hold dear….The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it."

While I felt a bit flimflammed by the book’s cover that strongly implied the book contained new material, it is hard to complain when the result is reading a collection of essays on early Americans by Edmund Morgan. 4.5 stars. Highly recommended. ( )

American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America (W.W. Norton, 2009) is leading historian Edmund S. Morgan's new collection of (mostly) previously-published essays. Of his choices for inclusion, he writes "The people I have selected here, whether public heroes or simply my own favorites, have all surprised me in one way or another. Something about them has sent me looking at the records they left behind, often looking for a second time, having second thoughts" (p. xiii). He adds that he sees many of his characters as heroes or heroines by virtue of an "ability to say no ... in resistance to what society or its custodians demanded of them" (p. xiv).

The book, drawn as it is from very disparate essays, seems a bit of a hodgepodge. A chapter on Christopher Columbus which focuses on the clash of cultures and motives between the "conquerors" and the native Caribbean islanders they encountered is followed by a (wonderful) piece on the Yale College library and its power to shape young minds (more on this below). In "The Unyielding Indian" Morgan pays homage to the native people of North America for their resistance to European "absorption" and their high valuation of individual freedom ("we see in him what we might be if we carried some of our avowed principles to their logical conclusion", p. 53).

In a pair of essays both originally published in 1942, Morgan examines the stereotype as Puritans as sexless prudes (and finds it misses the point, as later works have continued to show), and delves into one of the most fascinating legal battles of 17th-century Boston, the long feud between heiress Anne Keayne and her impotent, money-grubbing, sometime-husband Edward Lane. He profiles Anne Hutchinson and Michael Wigglesworth ("the puritan's puritan"), and declares his admiration for Salem witchcraft players Giles Corey and Mary Easty.

Two pieces compare Yale presidents Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight, and Ben Franklin and George Washington, and Morgan delves further into Franklin's pragmatic streak in a separate essay. In the final two chapters, he examines the "fiction" of representation as a political reality, and discusses the vital role of the Antifederalists in the creation of the American government as we know it. Finally, he closes the book with an appreciation of his own teacher, Perry Miller.

All of these essays are written with the clarity and strength of composition which have made Morgan's works so accessible and interesting over the course of his long career (his first book was published in 1952; the first essay included here is from 1937). He can turn a phrase, and sometimes even gets off an excellent joke in the process (in the essay on Salem, he says of Cotton Mather's pre-Salem 'victory' over the devil in the case of a possessed girl "he could not refrain from from giving way to his most conspicuous weakness: he had to write a book about it", p. 118). His sense of irony never fails, and it is remarkable how timely these essays remain even though many of them first saw print more than a half-century ago (although I have not compared them to the original versions to see if they have been heavily edited for re-publication here).

For reasons obvious to those who know me, I was most taken by Morgan's chapter on the early library at Yale ("Dangerous Books," from 1959). He waxes poetic on libraries here, calling them "the great hothouses of change, where new ideas are nursed into being and then turned loose to do their work" (p. 24). He concludes the essay thus: "While libraries exist, where students and scholars can go to the original sources and discover the facts for themselves, all efforts at control will be futile ... I hope your library and mine will continue to be dangerous for many years to come" (p. 38). Hear hear!

My one quibble with this volume is that I would have liked to see the original publication information for the essays at the beginning (it is, instead, on the back of the title page in tiny print, with only the date at the end of each essay). Other than that minor detail, it was a delight.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/06/book-review-american-heroes.html ( )