The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop

Edmund Morgan (1916-2013) was a prominent scholar of colonial American history. The son of a Harvard Law professor, he also attended Harvard where he earned his BA and PhD. He taught at the University of Chicago and Brown University before landing a position at Yale University in 1955. He worked there for the rest of his career, building a reputation both as one of the preeminent historians in his field and a popular classroom teacher. His ability to write engaging history that offered new, nuanced interpretations of American history garnered the Bancroft Prize in American History in 1989, the National Humanities Medal in 2000, and a special Pulitzer Prize for his body of work as a whole in 2006. He also earned a number of other awards from professional historical societies for his books.

Morgan’s major early career contribution focused on analyzing the Puritan movement as a serious phenomenon. Unlike many historians who accepted the repressive Puritanical stereotypes, he took its intellectual underpinnings seriously, despite his own atheism. He particularly noted Puritanism’s sophisticated wrestling with the nuances of the role of belief in society and one’s everyday life. His first book analyzed the Puritan family. The Puritan Dilemma is the second of his three major studies on the topic.