Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) was a leading American naval historian, biographer, and historian of Puritanism.

Samuel Eliot Morison was born in Boston on July 9, 1887, into a prominent family with deep roots in the Massachusetts past. He attended Harvard, obtaining his doctorate in 1912. There he derived the precept of history as a literary art. His dissertation, concerning Harrison Gray Otis, an ancestor whose papers were in Morison's attic, was sympathetic to the old Federalist.

In 1915 Morison joined the faculty at Harvard. His Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 (1921) earned him considerable fame. The book traced broad social and economic trends in Massachusetts up to the Civil War. While at Harvard he also served on the American Commission to Negotiate Peace between 1918 and 1919 and was one of the key individuals responsible for drafting the Versailles Treaty. Morison became the first Harmsworth professor of American history at Oxford in 1922, a position he...