Revolutionary Thoughts
Glimpses into the hearts & minds of the women and men who breathed life into the 18th-century Atlantic world.
“Our All is at Stake, & the little Conveniencys & Comforts of Life, when set in Competition with our Liberty, ought to be rejected not with Reluctance but with Pleasure.”
“I think the fortuitous influence of chance so much more decisive of the success or miscarriage of statesmen’s schemes, than the skill or dexterity of the most able and most artful of them, that I am apt to attribute much less to the one, and much more to the other, than the generality of historians, either from prejudice to their heroes or partiality to their own conjectures, are willing to allow.”
“I think it is the mystery of the past that makes it so wonderful. We never can know quite enough about it. All legends are like pictures seen through a fog; it lifts and shows a glimpse, then as quickly closes in again. I always want to know what happened next.”
Extract (by anticipation) from an Historian of the 20th Century, 4 February 1783.
The situation of America afforded the best hopes of success. A
divided Congress, unused to govern. and many of them giddy with their
elevation, jealous of their Generalissimo (as the Long Parliament had
been of Cromwell) and he no less jealous of them, an exhausted Treasury,
ruined credit, spiritless, ill-cloathed, ill-armed, ill-paid, and
mutinying troops, seemed to mark them out, and hold them forth, as
victims to an offended and insulted Mother Country. The Americans too
began with justice to suspect the assistance of the French, and to
conclude that the restless ambition of that people, rather than their
love for liberty, had caused them to cross the Atlantic. While the
British army long mewed up at New-York. in conjunction with unnumbered
loyalists, only waited for some spirited Commander, to cut asunder with
their swords the chains, which the impotent policy of a deluded
P——–t had forged for them, and once more to meet their enemies, and
to conquer them. – Horace Walpole
My 2015 End-of-Year Heritage Giving Recommendations
My 2015 End-of-Year Heritage Giving Recommendations
2015 has been a curious year for heritage institutions, one that has generated fundamental questions about what they do and how they do it. We have seen the spectacular, the exciting, the innovative, the bizarre, and the inscrutable (sometimes all wrapped into one), which have sparked necessary, and long overdue, discussions of the ways we preserve the past–even, importantly, debates over whose…
All Dressed Up, With Everywhere To Go: Plimoth Plantation and the Future of Public History
All Dressed Up, With Everywhere To Go: Plimoth Plantation and the Future of Public History
A month or so ago, a friend of mine and I sat on the front porch of Concord’s Colonial Inn, our regular place of refreshment, and talked about the reasons behind the steady decline of large, recreated public history sites like Historic Deerfield, Old Sturbridge Village, and Colonial Williamsburg. A pioneering public historian himself, who established the program at the College of William & Maryth…
“Their is a grate Petition to Yr Honr By Gumby and The old House gang for som meat if yr Honr Think Fitt of it”
Grave Truths: A Williamsburg That Is “For Ever England”
Grave Truths: A Williamsburg That Is “For Ever England”
We know there are graveyards large and small throughout Williamsburg, Virginia, that date from the revolutionary era. There are formal cemeteries, like that surrounding Bruton Parish Church, and much more intimate family graves, tucked discretely behind colonial houses. They represent the final resting places of the well-known (a signer of the U.S. Constitution, children of U.S. presidents and