Quotes from Nathaniel Philbrick

then it was on to Boston and a big parade. "Finding this ceremony was not to be avoided though I had made every effort to do it," Washington recorded in his diary

The real Revolution was so troubling and strange that once the struggle was over, a generation did its best to remove all traces of the truth. No one wanted to remember how after boldly declaring their independence they had so quickly lost their way; how patriotic zeal had lapsed into cynicism and self-interest; and how, just when all seemed lost, a traitor had saved them from themselves.

Men's minds are as variant as their faces," he wrote. "Liberality and charity . . . ought to govern in all disputes about matters of importance." On the other hand, "clamor and misrepresentation . . . only serve to foment the passions, without enlightening the understanding.

Without the discovery of Arnold's treason in the fall of 1780, the American people might never have been forced to realize that the real threat to their liberties came not from without but from within.

Custer did not drink; he didn't have to. His emotional effusions unhinged his judgment in ways that went far beyond alcohol's ability to interfere with clear thinking.

her hull might be compared to a fat man on the short end of a lopsided seesaw

Lafayette, who later claimed, "I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.

This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by his enablers, the so-called professionals, who keep whispering in his ear.

For peace and for survival, others must be accommodated. The moment any of them gave up on the difficult work of living with their neighbors—and all of the compromise, frustration, and delay that inevitably entailed—they risked losing everything. It was a lesson that Bradford and Massasoit had learned over the course of more than three long decades. That it could be so quickly forgotten by their children remains a lesson for us today.

You are fighting for what you can never obtain, and we are defending what we never mean to part with.

Old Sturbridge Village, a living museum that re-creates life in New England through the 1830s

As the fire made its way up Main Street with alarming rapidity, individual homeowners started bidding for the fire companies' services so as to protect their own houses. Instead of working together as a coordinated unit, the companies split off in different directions, allowing the blaze to build into an uncontrollable

I have . . . learnt from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances; we carry the seeds of the one or the other

Like it or not, the factories of New Haven, Hartford, Boston, Beverly, and Haverhill were the country's future, and Washington was all for it. —

The biggest advantage of the area was that it had already been cleared by the Indians. And yet nowhere could they find evidence of any recent Native settlements. The Pilgrims saw the eerie vacancy of this place as a miraculous gift from God. But if a miracle had indeed occurred at Plymouth, it had taken the form of a holocaust almost beyond human imagining.

In the end, both sides wanted what the Pilgrims had been looking for in 1620: a place unfettered by obligations to others.

On an island of paradoxes, the Quaker whalemen were perhaps the most paradoxical. At once pacifist whalehunters, plain-dressed millionaires, abolitionist floggers of common seamen, and devoted family men who were never home, these "Quakers with a vengeance" embodied a truly mind-boggling array of contradictions.

Midshipman Edward Pellew was in the British boat right behind Arnold's. The American general had escaped, but in his haste he had left behind his stock and buckle, which Pellew took as a keepsake. Years later, by which time Pellew had become the much-decorated admiral Viscount Exmouth, he could not help but wonder how differently the War of Independence might have turned out if on that cold autumn day near the southern tip of Lake Champlain he had captured Benedict Arnold.

bloc, effectively guaranteeing that

Robinson's fierce quest for spiritual purity had been tempered by the realization that little was to be gained by arrogance and anger.

Newburyport Public Library. In 1789, the president lodged in a big brick building that in 1865 was turned into the town's library.

Although the hill is not high enough to enable one to see Nantucket in its entirety, Altar Rock is the best seat in the house when it comes to imagining how the island originally came into being. Between 22,000 and 16,000 years ago, a giant glacier stretching across what is now Nantucket Sound bulldozed Saul's Hills into a rough approximation of their present form. This is where the icy shovel of the bulldozer stopped, dumping the boulder we see beside us.

However baby man may brag of his science and skill . . . ," Melville writes in Moby-Dick, "yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make.

As Starbuck discovers, simply being a good guy with a positive worldview is not enough to stop a force of nature like Ahab, who feeds on the fears and hatreds in us all.