08/28/2025
Meet Tufts History PhD Dane Morrison! After completing his degree at Tufts in 1983, Dane accepted a position at Salem State University. Since then Morrison has authored or edited six books, including (most recently) "True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity" (Johns Hopkins University Press). A Jumbo for life, he writes that:
“When I entered Tufts as a doctoral candidate in 1975, the tides of History were turning in so many ways. Not only were we aware that the times were historic (the close of the Indochina War, rising tensions in the Cold War, fraught progress in the struggle for African American, Native American, Latino, and women’s rights), but the discipline of History was itself experiencing dramatic changes. New approaches to scholarship and teaching, styled the “new social history” or “history from the bottom up,” were challenging the bastions of a largely white, largely male-dominated profession.
"Brilliant scholar-teachers such as Douglas Jones, Howard Malchow, Virginia Drachman, Pierre Laurent, and Howard Solomon responded with exciting offerings such as Poverty in Colonial America, Social Deviance in Early Modern Europe, and Crime in Victorian England, inspiring me to break dusty conventions in my own teaching and writing. They taught me to incorporate Native American voices to recall the Puritan invasion in colonial America or sailors’ logbooks and journal to trace the first American voyages across the Pacific in books such as True Yankees and Eastward of Good Hope.
"I am retired now, after nearly forty years of teaching the 'Tufts way,' hoping that I brought the same spirit of passionate inquiry into my own classrooms and looking forward to what the next generations of Tufts historians will achieve."
