At the annual meeting in Chicago last December, Woodrow Wilson Borah and Edmund Sears Morgan were the recipients of the AHA’s Award for Scholarly Distinction. The following are excerpts from citations read by President Carl Degler, during a presentation ceremony:
As we approach the quincentennial of the Spanish discovery of America, it is fitting that we honor a North American scholar who has made extraordinary contributions to the history of Spain in America. As scholar and teacher Woodrow Wilson Borah has defined bold new directions in Latin American social, economic, and demographic studies. Always experimenting with new methods, always enlarging our historical knowledge by engaging in rigorous interdisciplinary research, Woodrow Borah’s investigations of pre-Columbian Mexico and colonial Hispanic America have forced historians to reconsider and revise a myriad of basic concepts concerning Spanish colonial development.
His has been the critical eye. A pioneer examining issues as diverse as the seventeenth-century economic decline of New Spain, ecological and dietary. patterns,. colonial trade between Spanish-American colonies and demographic crises of the indigenous peoples of Mesa-America, Borah has imposed the highest scholarly standards both on himself and his fellow col leagues and students. As a scholar and mentor, Woodrow Borah has served our profession throughout the world.
To survey the accomplishments of Edmund Sears Morgan is to encapsulate many of the seismic shifts within American historical scholarship since the 1940s. Thanks largely to his convincing reinterpretation of New England Puritanism and of the American Revolution, students today seldom read the Progressive historians against whom he rebelled.
Edmund Morgan has made the beliefs and habits of seventeenth-century New Englanders credible and relevant to a modern secular audience. And he has argued brilliantly for the principled strength of America’s protest movement against Britain in the 1760s. But more important, Professor Morgan has played a key role in opening up new avenues to the study of early American society.
Much as Morgan appreciated the great work of his teacher Perry Miller, he has encouraged his students to explore alternate approaches toward early American intellectual history. His study of the Puritan family has done more than any other single book to stimulate the investigation of early American social history.
In his most ambitious and challenging book, American Slavery, American Freedom, which received the Beveridge Award from our Association, he argues for a symbiotic relationship between early American definitions of black slavery and white freedom. Edmund Morgan is a complete master of our craft.
