Edmund Morgan

Historian Edmund S. Morgan is the author of the 2002 best-seller Benjamin Franklin. He says his latest book, The Genuine Article, “amounts to an intellectual autobiography” of his scholarly career.

The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century by Perry Miller (Belknap, $28). Miller made me take seriously the ideas of the New England Puritans, who looked at the world in a very different way from myself or anyone I knew. Writing with extraordinary clarity and resonance about a highly complex system of thought, Miller shows how compelling religious beliefs can be in determining human behavior at any time or place.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber (Routledge, $16). Despite the numerous criticisms of this book, it first showed me and others the links between religion and economic behavior.

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The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss (W.W. Norton, $14). I discovered this 50-year-old book only late in life, but it showed me the surprisingly large role that gifts play in human relationships in all societies.

A Land by Jacquetta Hawkes (Beacon, $15). This 1952 book taught me to look at landscape as part of history. Hawkes connects human history with geological and geographical history, showing us how distinct geological formations and the building materials obtained from them have affected the character of different historical times and styles of building.

The World We Have Lost by Peter Laslett (Routledge, $22). Laslett’s 1965 study opened up for me new ways of discovering the patterns of human relationships before the Industrial Revolution. By determining the size of families, when people married, how long they could expect to live, and other vital statistics for earlier ages, Laslett gives us new perspectives on a way of life that differs significantly from our own in its conceptions of time, labor, productive activity, and family ties.

American National Biography