The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop

The fact that Edmund Morgan, as a professional academic historian, wrote a biography at all is a product of his time. For the last third of the 20th century and still to an extent today, academic historians have doubted the value of biography (at least of “great men”) to explain what is essential about the past. They have thus often regulated biography to the province of popular history. Morgan, by contrast, wrote during a period when historians valued a deep understanding of the most prominent figures of history, both as a tool to understand past events and as case studies for what works in leadership. The Puritan Dilemma fits squarely into this older tradition.

Morgan belonged to what became known as the “Consensus School” of American history. In contrast to Marxist historians who framed everything in terms of class conflict, the Consensus School argued that cooperation and agreement had more importance. They saw an American tradition in which people of different parties and social classes had similar values. Democratic traditions offered a venue for debating how to apply those values: Each debate shaped and shifted the consensus slightly, but the American people held to a core sense of shared identity, values, and unity.