Quotes from David Hackett Fischer

Until Washington crossed the Delaware, the triumph of the old order seemed inevitable. Thereafter, things would never be the same again.

Americans tended to think of war as something that had to be done from time to time, for a particular purpose or goal. They fought not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of winning.

Empirical studies show that New Zealanders are the most widely traveled people on the planet. The computer and the Internet have made a major difference. Insularity, distance, and isolation may have been important in an earlier period of New Zealand's history, but not today. The rapid progress of communications has wrought a revolution in the spatial condition of New Zealand, and yet its culture remains very distinctive. This fact suggests that distance itself is not the key.

Fiddlesticks!" Rall replied. "These clodhoppers will not attack us, and should they do so, we will simply fall on them and rout them."58 (on describing that they had nothing to fear from the COlonists of New Jersey before the night of December 25, 1776; when Washington and his men crossed the Deleware.)

Many activities were forbidden on the Sabbath: work, play, and unnecessary travel. Even minor instances of Sabbath-breaking were punished with much severity. The Essex County Court indicted a man for carrying a burden on the Sabbath, and punished a woman for brewing on the Lord's Day. When Ebenezer Taylor of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, fell into a forty-foot well, his rescuers stopped digging on Saturday afternoon while they debated whether it was lawful to rescue him on the Sabbath. Other

It was typical of Washington's style of leadership to present a promising proposal as someone else's idea, rather than his own.

threatened. As late as 1775, townsmen within twenty miles of the sea were urged to carry arms to church lest godless British raiding parties surprise them while at worship. After the service, the men left the meeting first—a regional folkway that continued long after its military origins had been forgotten.

We never let go of a belief once fixed in our minds" quoted by an Appalachian women with an air of pride.' (This quote explains a lot about my family)

Every Canadian winter was a mortal challenge to its habitants.

These are the times that try men's souls," Paine began. "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

One of the few points of agreement between Anglican Virginians and Puritan New Englanders was their common loathing of Quakers.

The moral passages in Coffe Slocum's journals were not examples of static African "survivals," or of rote borrowing from Puritan and Quaker beliefs. They were something new in the world—another ethic that emerged when African and European traditions met in the mind of a very bright and able Akan-speaking freedman in eighteenth-century New England.

New England later attracted large numbers of Catholic Irish, Italians, Jews, Armenians, and others. Each of these many ethnic groups cherished its own heritage. At the same time, they also became New Englanders. They lived in Yankee houses, grew accustomed to town meetings, began to talk like Yankees, and learned to play by Yankee rules.

Shame had an emotional power which it has lost today.

In terms of class, for example, the dominant elite in one section tended to ally itself with the proletariat in the other.

Not a single ex-servant or son of a servant became a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses during the late seventeenth century.

Of all the English-speaking people in the seventeenth century, the Quakers moved farthest toward the idea of equality between the sexes.

This new dialect of England's ruling class differed markedly from the speech ways of American colonists, to whom it seemed contrived and pretentious.

The psychological cement of this system was a culture of subordination which modern historians call deference.

Quaker settlements were "the first scene of a major, widespread, obviously successful assertion of the child-centered, fond-fostering, nuclear family in early America and most likely in the Anglo-American world.

This relationship created intense feelings of anxiety and fear among the "common folk," in a manner that is not easy for people of another world to understand.

Alexander Hamilton, a native West Indian, naturalized New Yorker and extreme nationalist who had no roots in any regional culture.

Americans tended to think of war as something that had to be done from time to time, for a particular purpose or goal. They fought not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of winning.

A universal law has often operated through much of American history. When race slavery, or other systems of racial inequality declined, racism tended to increase, and new forms of racial violence were quick to follow.