Quotes by Alice Morse Earle

About Alice Morse Earle:

Alice Morse Earle was an American historian and author from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was christened Mary Alice by her parents Edwin Morse and Abby Mason Clary. On 15 April 1874, she married Henry Earle of New York, changing her name from Mary Alice Morse to Alice Morse Earle. Her writings, beginning in 1890, focussed on small sociological details rather than grand details, and thus are invaluable for modern social historians. She wrote a number of books on colonial America (and especially the New England region) such as Curious Punishments of Bygone Days.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Salem houses present to you a serene and dignified front, gracious yet reserved, not thrusting forward their choicest treasures to the eyes of passing strangers; but behind the walls of the houses, enclosed from public view, lie cherished gardens, fu...

Alice Morse Earle

It is heartrending to read the entries in many an old family Bible - the records of suffering, distress, and blasted hopes.

Alice Morse Earle

The study of tavern history often brings to light much evidence of sad domestic changes. Many a cherished and beautiful home, rich in annals of family prosperity and private hospitality, ended its days as a tavern.

Alice Morse Earle

In the seventeenth century, the science of medicine had not wholly cut asunder from astrology and necromancy; and the trusting Christian still believed in some occult influences, chiefly planetary, which governed not only his crops but his health and...

Alice Morse Earle

Every sea-captain who sailed to the West Indies was expected to bring home a turtle on the return voyage for a feast to his expectant friends.

Alice Morse Earle

Our Puritan forefathers, though bitterly denouncing all forms and ceremonies, were great respecters of persons; and in nothing was the regard for wealth and position more fully shown than in designating the seat in which each person should sit during...

Alice Morse Earle

One of the earliest institutions in every New England community was a pair of stocks. The first public building was a meeting-house, but often before any house of God was builded, the devil got his restraining engine.

Alice Morse Earle

There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new...

Alice Morse Earle

From the hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New England, he had a Spartan struggle for life.

Alice Morse Earle

The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe exit of the latter.

Alice Morse Earle

We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which co...

Alice Morse Earle

Sunken gardens should be laid out under the supervision of an intelligent landscape architect; and even then should have a reason for being sunken other than a whim or increase in costliness.

Alice Morse Earle

We have very pretty Dutch gardens, so called, in America, but their chief claim to being Dutch is that they are set with bulbs, and have Delft or other earthen pots or boxes for formal plants or shrubs.

Alice Morse Earle

The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies.

Alice Morse Earle

When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable.

Alice Morse Earle

By the year 1670, wooden chimneys and log houses of the Plymouth and Bay colonies were replaced by more sightly houses of two stories, which were frequently built with the second story jutting out a foot or two over the first, and sometimes with the ...

Alice Morse Earle

Few of the early houses in New England were painted, or colored, as it was called, either without or within. Painters do not appear in any of the early lists of workmen.

Alice Morse Earle

The first and most natural way of lighting the houses of the American colonists, both in the North and South, was by the pine-knots of the fat pitch-pine, which, of course, were found everywhere in the greatest plenty in the forests.

Alice Morse Earle

The landlord of colonial days may not have been the greatest man in town, but he was certainly the best-known, often the most popular, and ever the most picturesque and cheerful figure.

Alice Morse Earle

The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile of the meeting-house.

Alice Morse Earle

Author Bio

  • NameAlice Morse Earle
  • DescriptionAmerican historian
  • BornApril 27, 1851
  • DiedFebruary 16, 1911
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionHistorian