Of course, what we should all like to attain in writing history is style. “The sense for style,” says Whitehead in his Aims of Education, “is an aesthetic sense, based on admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste. Style in art, style in literature, style in science, style in logic, style in practical execution, have fundamentally the same aesthetic qualities, namely, attainment and restraint. Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. . . Style is the ultimate morality of mind.”
United States admiral and historian (1887-1976)
Samuel Eliot Morison (July 9, 1887 – May 15, 1976) was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history and American history that were both authoritative and popular. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1959). In 1942, he was commissioned to write a history of United States naval operations in World War II, which was published in 15 volumes between 1947 and 1962. Morison wrote the popular Oxford History of the American People (1965), and co-authored the classic textbook The Growth of the American Republic (1930) with Henry Steele Commager.
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Samuel Morison
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And although American historians cannot hope, as Theodore Roosevelt did, to “watch the nearing chariots of the champions,” or to look forward to the day when “for us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the flood, and the harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls,” we may indeed “show how the land which the pioneers won slowly and with incredible hardship was filled in two generations by the overflow from the countries of western and central Europe.” We may describe the race, class, and religious conflicts that immigration has engendered, and trace the rise of the labor movement with a literary art that compels people to read about it.You do not need chariots and horsemen, harps and war-horns, to make history interesting.
Theodore Roosevelt in his presidential address before the American Historical Association in 1912 made a ringing plea to the young historian to do better: “He must ever remember that while the worst offense of which he can be guilty is to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he cannot write truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the truth.”
And in this flight of history from literature the public was left behind. American history became a bore to the reader and a drug on the market; even historians with something to say and the talent for saying it (Henry Adams, for instance) could not sell their books. The most popular American histories of the period 1890–1905 were those of John Fiske, a philosopher who had no historical training, but wrote with life and movement.
Even the earliest colonial historians, like William Bradford and Robert Beverley, knew that; they put conscious art into their narratives. And the historians of our classical period, Prescott and Motley, Irving and Bancroft, Parkman and Fiske, were great literary craftsmen. Their many-volumed works sold in sufficient quantities to give them handsome returns; even today they are widely read. But the first generation of seminar-trained historians, educated in Germany or by teachers trained there, imagined that history would tell itself, provided one was honest, thorough, and painstaking. Some of them went so far as to regard history as pure science and to assert that writers thereof had no more business trying to be “literary” than did writers of statistical reports or performers of scientific experiments. Professors warned their pupils (quite unnecessarily) against “fine writing,” and endeavored to protect their innocence from the seductive charm of Washington Irving or the masculine glamour of Macaulay.
Exploring American History has been a very absorbing and exciting business now for three quarters of a century. Thousands of graduate students have produced thousands of monographs on every aspect of the history of the Americas. But the American reading public for the most part is blissfully ignorant of this vast output. When John Citizen feels the urge to read history, he goes to the novels of Kenneth Roberts or Margaret Mitchell, not to the histories of Professor this or Doctor that. Why? American historians, in their eagerness to present facts and their laudable concern to tell the truth, have neglected the literary aspects of their craft. They have forgotten that there is an art of writing history.
Challenging is the note of freedom that still rings out from the Harvard Yard, into a world by no means so eager to hear it as a century ago. The University is a school of liberty as well as of learning; and events of the last few years have driven home the lesson that only in an atmosphere of liberty, and in a body politic that practises as well as preaches democracy, can learning flourish. Standing on the threshold of her fourth century, the University asks of the State, freedom; of her sons, loyalty; of God, grace that she may be saved from the besetting sin of pride, wisdom to do his will, and power 'to advance Learning, and perpetuate it to Posterity.'
After the Chesapeake incident, Jefferson lost the only chance of declaring war against Great Britain, when such a war would have secured unanimous support. Looking back on 1807 from a period of Hague conferences and arbitration treaties, Jefferson's moderation and restraint at that trying period seems most commendable. But the sequel proved that none of his expedients could prevent a war, which might far better have come in 1807, with the entire nation up in arms over the insult to its flag, than in 1812, after one section of the Union had been led by four years of commercial restriction into an attitude of violent disaffection. Instead of commencing reprisals or encour- aging the war spirit, Jefferson issued, on July 2, 1807, a proclamation closing American ports to British men-of-war, and expressing his confidence that Great Britain would apologize for the Leopard's action. The British government did acknowledge its fault, though somewhat ungraciously, and sent a special envoy to the United States to make reparation for the damage done, but with such conditions attached as to make it impossible for Jefferson to accept the offer.