And now that the Naval Institute Press is reissuing the series, with Volumes 7 through 9 due this spring, Morison’s masterwork is worth considering as a lesson in how history can have both blue-ribbon scholarship and popular appeal-and why works of such scale are almost never published anymore. The series, published between 19, was not only a comprehensive report on the Navy’s projection of power over two oceans, but a classic of historical literature that stands as the definitive treatment of its subject. In ten other ships, over three years, Morison amassed the eyewitness experience that buoyed his 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. That July, he boarded a destroyer and pressed into the cold swells of the Atlantic to witness the war against Germany’s U-boats. An armchair history job after peace is concluded won’t do.” Before April was out, Morison was meeting with Navy officials to accept a commission as a lieutenant commander and discuss the logistics of his globe-spanning assignment. “In order to do it the right way,” he told Roosevelt, “I must have a living, intimate connection with the Navy flagrante bello. ![]() ![]() Roosevelt to offer himself as a “sea-going historiographer” to chronicle the activities of the U.S. On March 23, 1942, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote to his friend President Franklin D.
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