Richard McGee Morse; Expert on Latin America

Richard McGee Morse, 78, a Latin American scholar who suggested that English-speaking North America had much to learn from its neighbors to the south. Born in Summit, N.J., and reared in Connecticut, Morse attended Princeton, served in the Navy during World War II, and earned a PhD at Columbia after the war. He taught history at Columbia, Yale and Stanford and later served as the secretary of the Latin American program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Morse, who became interested in Latin America when he visited Cuba as a college undergraduate, argued that the study of Latin America should not simply be “a case study in frustrated development,” but that of a living and breathing civilization. Morse’s most influential work was “Prospero’s Mirror,” published in Spanish in 1982, in Portuguese in 1988, but never entirely in English. On April 17 of Alzheimer’s disease at his home in Petionville, Haiti.