Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936

Samuel Eliot Morison

Harvard University Press, 1986 - History - 512 pages

This one-volume history of Harvard is not so much a summary of Samuel Eliot Morison's monumental work [The Tercentennial History of Harvard College and University, 1636-1936] as it is an entirely fresh handling of his vast material.

With a mind saturated in the lore and tradition at his command, Professor Morison has sat down to tell the whole story of Harvard informally and briefly. Documentation and all the learned apparatus of scholarly research are therefore omitted; but the same genial humor, the same ability to see the human implications of past events, that characterize his larger, multi-volume series on Harvard are preserved in this. The result is a marvelously entertaining volume, the history of Harvard that everyone has been waiting for, a model of vitalized historical writing.

Contents

• FIRST FLOWER OF THEIR WILDERNESS: 3
• SCHOOL OF THE PROPHETS: 20
• THE GREAT LEVERETT: 53
• WADSWORTH TO LANGDON: 76
• GOOD OLD COLONY TIMES: 101
• THROUGH CHANGE AND THROUGH STORM: 133
• PRESIDENT KIRKLAND: 195
• EXPANSION AND REFORM: 222
• PRESIDENT QUINCY: 246
• MINOR PROPHETS: 275
• WAR AND PEACE: 302
• PRESIDENT ELIOT: 323
• THE HARVEST SEASON: 365
• COLLEGE LIFE FROM WAR TO WAR: 400
• THE LOWELL ADMINISTRATION: 439
• TO ADVANCE LEARNING5: 485
• APPENDIX STATISTICS OF GROWTH 18691936: 492

About the author

Samuel Eliot Morison was born in Boston in 1887. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1912 and began teaching history there in 1915, becoming full professor in 1925 and Jonathan Trumbull professor of American history in 1941. He served as the university's official historian and wrote a three-volume history of the institution, the Tercentennial History of Harvard College and University, which was completed in 1936. Between 1922 and 1925 he was Harmsworth professor of American history at Oxford. He also was an accomplished sailor who retired from the navy in 1951 as a rear admiral. In preparing for his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of Christopher Columbus and John Paul Jones, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1941) and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1952) he took himself out of the study and onto the high seas, where he traced the voyages of his subjects and "lived" their stories insofar as possible. When it came time for the U.S. Navy to select an author to write a history of its operations in World War II, Morison was the natural choice for the task. In 1942, Morison was commissioned by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to write a history of U.S. naval operations in World War II and given the rank of lieutenant commander. The 15 volumes of his History of United States Naval Operations in World War II appeared between 1947 and 1962. Although he retired from Harvard in 1955, Morison continued his research and writing. A product of the Brahmin tradition, Morison wrote about Bostonians and other New Englanders and about life in early Massachusetts. He was an "American historian" in the fullest sense of the term. He also had a keen appreciation for the larger history of the nation and world, provincial is the last word one would use to describe Morison's writing.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936
• Author: Samuel Eliot Morison
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1986
• ISBN: 067488891X, 9780674888913
• Length: 512 pages
• Subjects: History / United States / General; History / United States / State & Local / New England (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT)