Ann Rinaldi Quotes

I think everyone should read Governor William Bradford's diary.

There were human beings aboard the Mayflower, not merely ancestors.

My own forefathers arrived in America in 1620 on the Mayflower.

Pocahontas was the reason the Virginia colony didn't disappear, unlike some earlier attempts.

Descendants of New England pioneers are proud of their ancestry and glad to proclaim the fact that so far as the United States are concerned, New England is in deed the cradle of religious liberty.

There were Indians at Harvard College in the 1600s.

Massachusetts developed America.

Massachusetts we look at as the home of liberal democracy. In the 16th century, it was the home of repressive theology.

The first English settlers of North America knew they were making history. New Englanders in particular were so sure of it that they started writing their own accounts of themselves as soon as they got here.

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.

As with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, the origins of Shearith Israel trace back to a small group of religious freedom-seekers and a treacherous ocean passage to the New World.

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.

If you look at the beginning of this country, when the pilgrims came to this country, the first year they had a communistic experiment. They said, 'OK, we're going to take the land, we're going to work the land together and share in the fruits of our labor.' They almost starved to death. Almost half of them died that first year.

Without really analyzing it, I grew up in Massachusetts, so the Salem witch trials were always something that I was around. The average kindergartner probably doesn't know about it, except that in Massachusetts, you do, because they'll take you on field trips to see reenactments and stuff.

Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.

In our history, America began with a French look.

The Pilgrims landed, worthy men, And saved from wreck on raging seas;, They fell upon their knees, and then Upon the aborigines.

Most depictions of early America as a garden of opportunity airbrush indentured servants out of the picture while focusing on the minority who arrived free.

I think my mother's family came on the Mayflower from England - D.A.R., you know.

The men and women who occupied the east coast of North America between 1607 and 1800 have been more closely scrutinized than any other collection of people in American history.

Cotton Mather is one of those classic figures of American history who can't be left out. One has to explain him or explain him away, redeem him or denounce him.

The Puritans left behind so full a record of what they thought and did that scholars cannot resist the temptation to make the most of it.

You can't understand America without understanding the Puritans. In many ways, we're still living out their legacy in ways that are good and bad.

I'm very interested in the early American history, the time when the country came together.

Calvin was virtually the founder of America.