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" The American Revolution as it actually unfolded was so troubling and strange that once the struggle was over, a generation did its best to remove all traces of the truth. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Best
Struggle
Truth
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" Whaling was the oil business of its day. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Day
Whaling
Oil
" He was born in 1741, a descendant of the Rhode Island equivalent of royalty. The first Benedict Arnold had been one of the colony's founders, and subsequent generations had helped to establish the Arnolds as solid and respected citizens. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Born
First
Royalty
" Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Book
History
Space
" Right whales - so named because they were 'the right whale to kill' - grazed the waters off Nantucket as if they were seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Right
Whale
Through
" I'll watch anything, from action to art films. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Anything
Films
Art
" It is impossible to say when 37-year-old Benedict Arnold first met 18-year-old Peggy Shippen, but we do know that on September 25, 1778, he wrote her a love letter - much of it an exact copy of one he'd sent to another woman six months before. But if the overheated rhetoric was recycled, Arnold's passion was genuine. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Impossible
Love
Passion
" History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Always
Amazing
Evidence
" I had a great AP U.S. History teacher in Pittsburgh. We still exchange Christmas cards. She was the first teacher who said I was a good writer - and I'd never heard that before. And so I remember that, and I remember that level of loving the material and really loving writing about it. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Good
Teacher
History
" What's been largely forgotten is that Washington was highly passionate and aggressive, and it was only after losing Philadelphia to the British after a string of disastrous battlefield performances that he finally resigned himself to the more conservative approach with which he has since become associated. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
More
Philadelphia
Conservative
" A survival tale peels away the niceties and comforts of civilization. Suddenly, all the technology and education in the world means nothing. I think all of us wonder while reading a survival tale, 'What would I have done in this situation? Would I have made it?' "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Reading
Think
Technology
" Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Revolution
Good
Evil
" XTC is my favorite band; I'm a huge Neil Young fan, Jayhawks, all that type of stuff. I like Death Cab for Cutie, also Ryan Adams. I try to impress my children: 'Have you listened to such-and-such?' They're not impressed. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
You
Band
Impress
" I'm a big Stephen King fan. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Stephen King
Big
Fan
" To my mind, an adventure is something a person willingly undertakes. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Mind
Adventure
Person
" More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in 'Moby-Dick,' 'away off shore.' "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Shore
More
Miles
" The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Life
World
Living
" In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Say
Humanity
Growth
" Most Americans have no clue that before there were highways, there were only waterways to get through the wilderness. If you weren't on a lake or a river, you were in a jungle. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Jungle
You
Wilderness
" We think of the revolution ending in Yorktown, Va. The fact of the matter is that the French defeated the British in a naval battle right in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Because the British fleet was coming to rescue Cornwallis, the British general, Washington was able to surround Cornwallis. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Revolution
Mouth
Ending
" One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Writing
Face
Past
" Washington worked very hard to create his legacy. Even before the War of Independence was over, he was assembling his papers and making sure they were going to be in a state of preservation that would represent as best he could the official side of what occurred during the Revolution. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Create
Revolution
War
" When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Creative
God
Work
" Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see figures from the past as caricatures - either all good or all bad - when the truth is always much more complex. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Always
Good
Past
" By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Local
Virtually
Whale
" I was an English major at Brown. I never enjoyed history classes. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
English
History
Never
" There's an ugly civil war side to revolutionary Boston that we don't often talk about and a lot of thuggish, vigilante behavior by groups like the Sons of Liberty. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Behavior
Boston
War
" As long as I can remember, I've been writing - first poems, then stories, and by my early teenage years I was also in love with sailing. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Early
Long
Love
" After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Literature
American
Want
" If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
You
Way
Us
" Nantucket's English settlers, who first disembarked on the island in 1659, had been mindful of the sea's dangers. They had hoped to earn their livelihoods not as fishermen but as farmers and shepherds on this grassy isle dotted with ponds, where no wolves preyed. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Farmers
Sea
Earn