Edmund Morgan Quotes

The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession.

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.

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.

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

But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public.

Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement.

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 think we're very uptight in America. You have to remember that we're descended from Puritans. Whether or not the country is now composed of immigrants, our culture as American really begins with the landing of the Pilgrims and a puritanical view of things.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.

I was interested in what was really going on in Salem at that time, and I resolved to investigate this seemingly unorthodox treatment of the people and the period.

If there ever was a militant religion, it was that of early New England.

Puritan standards have become the public standards of America, and you will find more of New England in Colorado Springs, Boulder, or Greeley than in most towns of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts developed America.

History, we now know, is not merely, of even primarily, past politics, it is also past economics, past society, past religion, past civilization, in short—past everything.

The starting point for the new history, both in Europe and America, has been the record of births, marriages, and deaths, which most literate societies preserve in one form or another. In colonial America, surviving records of this kind - as of every other kind - are most abundant for New England.

Cotton Mather's publications in his own lifetime amounted to more than 400 titles, and his magnum opus, on which he labored most of his life, remains unpublished: a commentary on every verse of every book of the Bible. Anyone who leaves that kind of record behind issues an irresistible invitation to historians.

Historia (Inquiry); so that the actions of of people will not fade with time.

An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

Calvin was virtually the founder of America.

Seriousness is not Calvinistic, it's not a renunciation, it's the very opposite of that.

But then history does not only consist of documents.

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

The people who came to New England, came for freedom of religion. The problem is, freedom of religion to them meant freedom for only their religion