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" 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. "
Edmund Morgan
Classic
Cotton
Him
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" 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
America
Starting
New
" 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
Human
Beginning
Scholarship
" 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
Will
Work
Past
" What was the American Revolution? The people who joined to carry it out had different views of what they had done. "
Edmund Morgan
People
Revolution
Out
" 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. "
Edmund Morgan
Own
America
Got
" 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. "
Edmund Morgan
Women
America
History
" 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
Men
History
Everything
" Between 1776 and 1789, Americans replaced a government over them with a government under them. They have worried ever since about keeping it under. Distrust of its powers has been more common and more visible than distrust of the imperial authority of England ever was before the Revolution. "
Edmund Morgan
Authority
Government
Over
" The musket, always a muzzleloader, took minutes to reload; an archer could aim and fire up to a dozen arrows in a minute. Muskets required continual cleaning and repair; bows were quickly made and easily maintained. "
Edmund Morgan
Cleaning
Fire
Repair
" Liberty had many friends in the eighteenth century. "
Edmund Morgan
Many
Century
Had
" 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. "
Edmund Morgan
Book
Bible
Own
" Why consider debates in the English House of Commons in 1628 along with documents on American developments in the late eighteenth century? The juxtaposition is not capricious, because the Commons during this period generated many of the ideas that were later embodied in the government of the United States. "
Edmund Morgan
American
Late
Government
" Vox populi vox dei: the voice of the people is the voice of God. The slogan was useful for those who first attempted to substitute the people for God as the source of political authority. Their attempt was ultimately so successful that God no longer seems to be needed in government. "
Edmund Morgan
Political
God
Government
" 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
People
Government
Live
" The famous convention of 1787 met in Philadelphia to define the additional powers needed to enable Congress to do its job effectively. Instead, the convention proposed a brand new national government. "
Edmund Morgan
Government
Brand
Congress
" Throughout his long career, Washington earned the adulation not merely of ordinary people but of the other luminaries whom we now hail as 'founding fathers.' "
Edmund Morgan
Now
Long
Career
" History, at its best, always tells us as much indirectly about ourselves as it does directly about our predecessors, and it is often most revealing when it deals with episodes and phenomena that we find repulsive. "
Edmund Morgan
Deals
Us
Find
" Washington presided at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and is often credited with its success. But he had no known part in drafting its provisions. "
Edmund Morgan
Washington
Constitutional
Success
" Everybody knows that Alexander Hamilton was a founding father of the United States, a young father to be sure: only thirty at the time of the Constitutional Convention and just turned thirty-eight when he left behind his brilliant career as Secretary of the Treasury. "
Edmund Morgan
Father
Young
Time
" Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; Madison wrote not only the United States Constitution, or at least most of it, but also the most searching commentary on it that has ever appeared. Each of them served as president of the United States for eight years. What they had to say to each other has to command attention. "
Edmund Morgan
Attention
Constitution
Independence
" To make a successful film from a successful play is probably much more difficult than making one from scratch, just as any carpenter will tell you that it is more difficult to restore an old house than to build a comparable new one. "
Edmund Morgan
Successful
House
You
" Who would think it possible to redirect historical scholarship by explaining what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence? "
Edmund Morgan
Said
Independence
Think
" Thomas Paine, so celebrated and so despised as he traveled through the critical events of his time, has long appealed to biographers. Paine was present at the creation both of the United States and of the French Republic. His eloquence, in the pamphlet 'Common Sense,' propelled the American colonists toward independence. "
Edmund Morgan
Long
American
Independence
" Franklin was the best known of the Founding Fathers. His death could not go without some sort of official notice. The House of Representatives, after listening to a brief tribute by James Madison, voted to wear badges of mourning for two months and then got on with business. "
Edmund Morgan
Best
House
Death
" It was not necessary and might even have been disadvantageous for a government to claim a direct personal commission and communion of the kind God had given some rulers in the Old Testament. A working government might need the support of the Church but not of God Himself in a voice from on high. "
Edmund Morgan
Voice
Support
Government
" 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
New
Culture
Politics
" Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds. "
Edmund Morgan
Past
American
Black
" 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
End
Think
People
" The three hundredth anniversary of the Salem witch trials of 1692 comes at a time when witchcraft commands a scholarly attention that would have been puzzling in 1892 or even in 1792. "
Edmund Morgan
Attention
Three
Time
" Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. "
Edmund Morgan
Wisdom
Beyond
Human