Audiobook23 hours
American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America
Written by Edmund S. Morgan
Narrated by David Chandler
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edmund S. Morgan delivers 17 stirring essays about heroic Americans. John Winthrop's unpopular stand saves Massachusetts Bay Colony. William Penn's principles forge a Philadelphia miracle. George Washington's strategy stuns the British. And Anti-Federalist opposition fosters the Bill of Rights.
Author
Edmund S. Morgan
Edmund S. Morgan is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. His many books include Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America and The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution.
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Reviews for American Heroes
Rating: 3.6666666466666666 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
15 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As many other reviewers have written, the title and cover of this book do not accurately depict what this collection of essays are about. The essays generally cover the colonial period in New England, with a few sprinkled in about Washington and Franklin late in the book. The idea that the central thesis of the essays is about Heroes is also not true as the essays generally handle a topic or specific aspect of an historical person but do not focus on whether or not those action are heroic.
I enjoyed a few of the essays, but there were too many that were too narrowly focused for my tastes. I think Morgan writes well, but most of these essays were obviously written for other scholars and for academia and not for the general public (even those of us who are well-read in the time period). - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This 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of authorship; there are several themes from the '40s and 50's, one from as recent as 2005 and a couple of previously unpublished pieces.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.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Could have been great but didn't really cover 'heros'. It was a bunch of his lectures strung together
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In 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.