“ Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust;Fear not the things thou suffer must;For, whom he loves he doth chastise, And then all tears wipes from their eyes.William BradfordPlymouth Colony Governor Nathaniel Philbrick
“ The moment any of them gave up on the difficult work of living with their neighbors--and all of the compromise, frustration, and delay that inevitably entailed--they risked losing everything. Nathaniel Philbrick
“ The future is never more important than to a people on the verge of a cataclysm. Nathaniel Philbrick
“ In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is. Nathaniel Philbrick
“ A good leader has to at some point trust those around him; otherwise, nothing constructive is going to get done. Nathaniel Philbrick
“ How much of assumed national and personal character comes from the fact that we have never truly known need to the point of having our character tested? Willing conscientious objectors underwent contr… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ For all they had suffered during those first terrible winters in America, their best years were behind them, in Leiden. Never again would they know the same rapturous sense of divine fellowship that h… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays a… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ Many of the so-called American characteristics,’ a chronicler of the [WW2 University of Minnesota starvation] experiment wrote, ‘—abounding energy, generosity, optimism—become intelligible as the expe… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ 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… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ To be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to make the darkness work for him. Ishmael says it best: For all men tragically great are made so through a certain m… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ The sperm whales’ network of female-based family units resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In th… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ This meant that while the vast majority of the country’s citizens stayed at home, the War for Independence was being waged, in large part, by newly arrived immigrants. Nathaniel Philbrick
“ In a letter to Benjamin Franklin he described how the explosion of the Augusta created a cloud like none other he had ever seen: a thick smoke rising like a pillar and spreading from the top like a tr… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ During World War II, the University of Minnesota’s Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene conducted what scientists and relief workers still regard today as a benchmark study of starvation. Partly funded… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ Yield. In April, Bradford had decided that each household should be assigned its own plot to cultivate, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew. The change in attitude was stunni… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ In an October 6 letter to Lord Stirling, he set forth the principle that would guide his increasingly sophisticated intelligence-gathering efforts. As we are often obliged to reason the designs of the… Nathaniel Philbrick
“ In 1836, the Lydia, a Nantucket whaleship, was struck and sunk by a sperm whale, as was the Two Generals a few years later. Nathaniel Philbrick
“ Custer did not drink; he didn’t have to. His emotional effusions unhinged his judgment in ways that went far beyond alcohol’s ability to interfere with clear thinking. Nathaniel Philbrick
