The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did... And when your own people started deserting in order to...
Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not in it frequently found together, and it is seldom easy to distinguish between the first two.
Many of the persons convicted at Salem were found to have dolls in their possession, a piece of circumstantial evidence that in itself was almost sufficient to convict them. But there were other ways...
There is no denying that Francis Drake was a pirate and that the enterprise he conducted four years later in Panama was highway robbery, or at best, highjacking. But it was on the scale that transform...
… the great and fundamental principles of their policy are, that every man is naturally free and independent, that no one … on earth has any right to deprive him of his freedom and independency, and t...
What, then, of the liberated slaves and Indians? The saddest part of the story and perhaps the most revealing is that no one bothered to say. None of the accounts either of Drake’s voyage or of the Ro...
How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the...
These numbers gave Virginia’s population about six times as large a proportion of gentlemen as England had. Gentlemen, by definition, had no manual skill, nor could they be expected to work at ordinar...
And he wanted no more of those other Puritan specialties: schools and books. In Virginia, he said, I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years...
The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and ind...
This diatribe was not mere youthful exuberance. In one of his last tracts, written when he was fifty-four, he described his opponent as a snake-in-the-grass and then specified what kind, a rattlesnake...
Libraries are the great hothouses of change, where new ideas are nursed into being and then turned loose to do their work.