Alice Morse Earle Quotes

So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there - fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

How I longed to see these things; how I longed to see the Liberty Bell and walk on the streets where Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin had walked.

Perhaps no country in Latin America is more picturesque than Bolivia, and the most memorable Bolivian city may be Potosi.

There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new world.

Nobody knows what really happened in any historical period. There are some periods where we know more than others, though.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

One of the earliest institutions in every New England community was a pair of stocks. The first public building was a meeting-house, but often before any house of God was builded, the devil got his restraining engine.

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.

I'll see a celadon green room in an 18th century New Hampshire house and just fall in love. Colors stay in my head.

Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.

Few of the early houses in New England were painted, or colored, as it was called, either without or within. Painters do not appear in any of the early lists of workmen.

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and TV programs.

There seems to be no end of books about the British empire, and the fascination it holds for historians of all descriptions is inexhaustible.

The southern colonists were not preoccupied with their own historical significance and mostly did not bother even to make the records of births, marriages, and deaths that they required of themselves by law. Nor did they write accounts of what they were up to for the benefit of posterity.

In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

History is truely the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.

History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.