The American Revolution was carried out in the name of the people, and it was supposedly ‘We, the people,’ who created the government that Americans still live under. Edmund Morgan Read Quote
Most historians don’t much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then. Edmund Morgan Read Quote
When Landon Carter, a Virginia plantation owner, read the Declaration of Independence two days after it was issued, he wondered whether its ringing affirmation of equality meant that slaves must be freed. If so, he confided to his diary, ‘You must send them out of the country, or they must steal for their support.’ Edmund Morgan Read Quote
The colonial period has been the proving ground in America for the new social history, which concentrates on the ordinary doings of ordinary people rather than on high culture and high politics. Unfortunately ordinary people, almost by definition, leave behind only faint traces of their existence. Edmund Morgan Read Quote
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. Edmund Morgan Read Quote
The men who founded and governed Massachusetts and Connecticut took themselves so seriously that they kept track of everything they did for the benefit of posterity and hoarded their papers so carefully that the whole history of the United States, recounted mainly by their descendants, has often appeared to be the history of New England writ large. Edmund Morgan Read Quote
The preoccupation of American historical and literary scholars with the New England Puritans must seem to outsiders like an obsession. Edmund Morgan Read Quote
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. Edmund Morgan Read Quote
Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself. Edmund Morgan Read Quote
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. Edmund Morgan Read Quote
