Personal

Samuel Eliot Morison was born in Boston, Massachusetts to John Holmes Morison (1856—1911) and Emily Marshall (Eliot) Morison (1857—1925) and named for his grandfather Samuel Eliot. His early childhood is charmingly described in a memoir of 1962, entitled "One Boy's Boston."

He married twice and was the father of four children by his first wife, Elizabeth S. Greene. (One of these children, Emily Morison Beck became the editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.) After his wife Elizabeth's death in 1945, in 1949 he married a Baltimore widow, Priscilla Barton. Morison again became a widower in 1973.

Morison died on May 15, 1976 of a stroke at the age of 88, and his ashes are buried at Northeast Harbor, Maine.

His grandson Michael Noyes Morison was known as "Franklin D. Churchill," storyline president of the Millennium Wrestling Federation. He died in June 2006.

Academic career

His schooling was typical for a member of a Boston Brahmin family: he attended Noble and Greenough School (1897—1901) and St. Paul's (1901—03) before enrolling at Harvard, where he would remain for much of his academic life.

Morison earned his AB from Harvard, where he was a member of the Phoenix S.K. Club, in 1908, studied at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris (1908—1909), and returned to Harvard where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1912. His doctoral thesis, The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, became Morison's first book.

Upon receiving his doctorate, Morison went to Berkeley to serve as an instructor in history, and, in 1915, returned to Harvard in the same capacity. After spending 1922—25 at Oxford as Harmsworth Professor of American History, he became full professor at Harvard in 1925. Morison was promoted to Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History in 1941 and retired from Harvard in 1955.

Morison continued writing prolifically after his retirement. He received the Balzan prize for history 1962 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Books

Morison held that experience and research should be combined synergetically for writing vivid history. For his Pulitzer-winning Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Morison combined his personal interest in sailing with his scholarship by chartering a boat and sailing to the various places that Christopher Columbus was then thought to have visited.

Unlike World War I, for which the US military had not prepared a full-scale official history of any branch of service, it was decided that World War II would be meticulously documented. Professional historians were attached to all the branches of the US military; they were embedded with combat units to witness the events about which they would later write.

Toward this end, in 1942, Morison was commissioned into the United States Naval Reserve with the rank of Lieutenant Commander. The result was the History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, a work in fifteen volumes that covered every aspect of America's war at sea, from strategic planning and battle tactics to the technology of war and the exploits of individuals during the conflict. A one-volume abridgement of the official history, The Two Ocean War, was published in 1963.

In recognition of his achievements, the Navy awarded him the Legion of Merit and eventually promoted Morison to the rank of Rear Admiral (Reserve). In addition, the Oliver Hazard Perry class guided-missile frigate, USS Samuel Eliot Morison, was named in his honor.

The celebrated British military historian Sir John Keegan has hailed Morison's official history as the best to come out of the Second World War.

One of his research assistants on that project, Henry Salomon, went on to conceive the epic NBC documentary series Victory at Sea.

Morison and his Growth of the American Republic co-author Henry Steele Commager were asked by delegations of African Americans to remove racist passages from the 1950 edition of their widely used history textbook. The following is an excerpt from the passages targeted as a false and objectionable justification for slavery.

As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ The majority of slaves were adequately fed, well-cared for, and apparently happy. Competent observers reported that they performed less labor than the hired man of the Northern states. Their physical wants were better supplied than those of thousands of Northern laborers, English operatives, and Irish peasants; their liberty was not much less than that enjoyed by the North of England ‘hinds’ or the Finnish torpare. Although brought to America by force, the incurably optimistic Negro soon became attached to the country, and devoted to his ‘white folks.’ Slave insurrections were planned -- usually by the free Negroes — but invariably betrayed by some faithful black; and trained obedience kept most slaves faithful throughout the Civil War. . . If we overlook the original sin of the slave trade, there was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization.

According to several sources, the entry was not removed until 1962 despite requests for change to the earlier editions that began in 1944.

In the Spring 2004 edition of History of Education Quarterly, Jonathan Zimmerman wrote the following:

Starting in 1950, for example, African Americans petitioned well-known race liberals Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison to revise their popular textbook, Growth of the American Republic, which declared that the American slave...or "Sambo," as the text called him...was "adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy." Privately, the authors joked about Black complaints..."bushman squawks," Morison called them...against their book. "Felix the nigger-baiter is funny!" Morison told Commager, using the latter's nickname. Miffed by attacks upon his own liberal credentials, Morison stressed that his daughter was married to Jewish NAACP President Joel Spingarn...and that "Sambo" had been Morison's childhood nickname. Eventually, Morison agreed to remove the term "pickanninies"; in future editions, he quipped, Black children would be described only as "nice little seal-brown darlings." But he insisted upon retaining "Sambo," "Uncle Daniel," and several other images of slave docility. "I will be damned if I will take them out for ... anybody," Morison told Commager.

—Zimmerman

The authors finally removed the passage in the 1962 version of their text book. The passage echoes the thesis of American Negro Slavery (1918) by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. This view, popularized by most white historians until the mid twentieth century, relied on the one-sided personal records of slave-owners and portrayed slavery as a mainly benign institution.

"The Phillips school of slavery historiography was not limited to the South or to a faction within the historical profession; as recently as 1950, for instance, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, of Harvard and Columbia Universities respectively, propagated the traditional interpretation in one of the leading college textbooks of the era," according to the American Social History Project at the City University of New York.

Pulitzer Prize winning historian Leon F. Litwack found the widely used textbook offensive, saying;

"The textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial biases. (I had already read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road.) The research led me to the library...and to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860—1880. Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook."

—Litwack

Most of these have been reprinted and reissued.

• The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, Federalist, 1765—1848 (1913)
• The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 (1921)
• The Oxford History of the United States (1927)
• Builders of the Bay Colony: A Gallery of Our Intellectual Ancestors (1930; 2nd ed., 1964)
• The Growth of the American Republic (with Henry Steele Commager, New York: Oxford University Press, 1930 [as Oxford History of the United States; 7th ed., 1980]. Revised and abridged edition with Samuel Eliot Morison and William E. Leuchtenberg. Published by Oxford University Press in 1980 as A Concise History of the American Republic, rev. 1983.
• The Founding of Harvard College (1935)
• Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (1936)
• Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636—1936 (Harvard University Press, 1936)
• The Puritan Pronaos (1936)
• Portuguese Voyages to America in the Fifteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1940)
• Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Little Brown, 1942)
• History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians (1946)
• The Ropemakers of Plymouth (1950)
• History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (1947—1962)
• Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620—1647 (editor) (1952)
• By Land and By Sea (1953)
• Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Little, Brown and Company, 1955)
• The Story of the 'Old Colony' of New Plymouth (1956)
• John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (Little, Brown and Company, 1959)
• The Story of Mount Desert Island (1960)
• One Boy's Boston: 1887-1901 (Houghton Mifflin, 1962)
• The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (1963)
• The Oxford History of the American People (1965)
• The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (1971)
• Samuel De Champlain: Father of New France (1972)
• The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages (1974)
• A Concise History of the American Republic (with Henry Steele Commager and William E. Leuchtenberg) (1976)

(years listed are when prizes were awarded)

Lifetime achievement honors

• Emerson-Thoreau Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961)
• Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1962)
• Balzan prize for history (1962)
• Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)

Military and Foreign Honors and Awards

• Legion of Merit with Combat Distinguishing Device "V"
• World War I Victory Medal
• American Campaign Medal
• Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal
• European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal
• World War Two Victory Medal
• Philippine Liberation Ribbon
• Commander of the Order of the White Rose of Finland
• Vuelo Panamericano Medal, awarded by the Republic of Cuba (1943) Fuerza Aerea Dominicana: Vuelo PanamericanoAcontecimientos de significativa trascendencia histórica, que repercutó en todos los países latinoamericanos, del [C]aribe y Europa, lo fue el Vuelo Panamericano[.] El recorrido aéreo por los cielos americanos fue una proyección de la Quinta Conferencia Internacional Americana, donde los Estados Unidos pertenecientes en el cónclave aprobaron por unanimidad la Resolución mediante la cual se recomendó a los Gobiernos de las Repúblicas Americanas, honrar la memoria del Gran Almirante Don Cristóbal Colón con la erección de un Faro Monumental en su honor [...]. Los gobiernos de Cuba y la República Dominicana, receptivos de esa directiva, se decidieron por mancomunar esfuerzos para crear una escuadrilla aérea que rasgara los espacios etéreos en recorrido de Buena Voluntad por los países americanos, haciendo de ese modo un llamado fraternal [...]. La Escuadrilla Panamericana estuvo integrada por cuatro aviones. Tres de ellos procedían de Cuba y pertenecían a la Sociedad Columbista Panamericana, al Ejército Constitucionalista de Cuba y a la Marina Constitucional Cubana, respectivamente.
• Cavaliero Ufficiale of the Italian Order, Ordine al Merito della Repubblica (1961)
• Commander of the Spanish Order of Isabel la Catolica (1963)

Book prizes

• Pulitzer Prize in biography for Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1943)
• Pulitzer Prize in biography for John Paul Jones (1960)
• Bancroft Prize for The Rising Sun in the Pacific (1949)
• Bancroft Prize for The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (1972)

Honorary degrees

• Trinity College, Hartford (1935)
• Amherst College (1936)
• Harvard University (1936)
• Union College (1939)
• Columbia University (1942)
• Yale University (1949)
• Williams College (1950)
• University of Oxford (1951)
• Bucknell University (1960)
• Boston College (1961)
• College of the Holy Cross (1962)

In honor of Samuel Eliot Morison

• USS Samuel Eliot Morison .
• Samuel Eliot Morison Award of the USS Constitution Museum.
• Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature of the Naval Order of the United States.
• Samuel Eliot Morison Naval History Scholarship of the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command.
• A bronze statue of Morison is on the Commonwealth Avenue mall in Boston, Massachusetts, between Exeter and Fairfield Streets.

• "American historians, in their eagerness to present facts and their laudable concern to tell the truth, have neglected the literary aspects of their craft. They have forgotten that there is an art of writing history." History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians (1946)

• "America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy." The Oxford History of the American People (1965)

• "But sea power has never led to despotism. The nations that have enjoyed sea power even for a brief period...Athens, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, the United States...are those that have preserved freedom for themselves and have given it to others. Of the despotism to which unrestrained military power leads we have plenty of examples from Alexander to Mao." The Oxford History of the American People (1965)