Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes
It is impossible to say when 37-year-old Benedict Arnold first met 18-year-old Peggy Shippen, but we do know that on September 25, 1778, he wrote her a love letter - much of it an exact copy of one he'd sent to another woman six months before. But if the overheated rhetoric was recycled, Arnold's passion was genuine.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution. Viking, 2016.
He was one of the Black intellectuals who criticized the white’s favorite Negro Leader, Booker T. Washington who concentrated his efforts on Black education and self-improvement to make Blacks more acceptable to whites. Trotter was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard University. He was an outspoken critic of President Woodrow Wilson’s policy that for the first time instituted official segregation of Federal Employment and his firing of all Blacks then in executive or white collar positions in the Federal Government. Wilson, for all his supposed modernity, was one of the most racist of all American Presidents. Washington thought that segregation was so entrenched that it would take many generations to eliminate it, and therefore felt that the best thing to do was to improve the positions of Blacks within the segregationist structure. Both sides were right from different perspectives although Trotter, Dubois and their followers did much more to confront and eventually change racist America.
Nathaniel Philbrick is an American author of history, winner of the National Book Award, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His maritime history, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which tells the true story that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick, won the 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was adapted as a film in 2015.
