David Hackett Fischer > Quotes

“New England farmers did not think of war as a game, or a feudal ritual, or an instrument of state power, or a bloodsport for bored country gentlemen. They did not regard the pursuit of arms as a noble profession. In 1775, many men of Massachusetts had been to war. They knew its horrors from personal experience. With a few exceptions, they thought of fighting as a dirty business that had to be done from time to time if good men were to survive in a world of evil. The New England colonies were among the first states in the world to recognize the right of conscientous objection to military service, and among the few to respect that right even in moments of mortal peril. But most New Englanders were not pacifists themselves. Once committed to what they regarded as a just and necessary war, these sons of Puritans hardened their hearts and became the most implacable of foes. Their many enemies who lived by a warrior-ethic always underestimated them, as a long parade of Indian braves, French aristocrats, British Regulars, Southern planters, German fascists, Japanese militarists, Marxist ideologues, and Arab adventurers have invariably discovered to their heavy cost.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere's Ride

“Americans tended to think of war as something that had to be done from time to time, for a particular purpose or goal. They fought not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of winning.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing

“This hostility to unnatural sex had a demographic consequence of high importance. Puritan moralists condemned as unnatural any attempt to prevent conception within marriage. This was not a common attitude in world history. Most primitive cultures have practiced some form of contraception, often with high success. Iroquois squaws made diaphragms of birchbark; African slaves used pessaries of elephant dung to prevent pregnancy. European women employed beeswax disks, cabbage leaves, spermicides of lead, whitewash and tar. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, coitus interruptus and the use of sheepgut condoms became widespread in Europe.14”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“Until Washington crossed the Delaware, the triumph of the old order seemed inevitable. Thereafter, things would never be the same again.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing

“Empirical studies show that New Zealanders are the most widely traveled people on the planet. The computer and the Internet have made a major difference. Insularity, distance, and isolation may have been important in an earlier period of New Zealand’s history, but not today. The rapid progress of communications has wrought a revolution in the spatial condition of New Zealand, and yet its culture remains very distinctive. This fact suggests that distance itself is not the key.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States

“Sexual intercourse was taboo on the Lord’s Day. The Puritans believed that children were born on the same day of the week as when they had been conceived. Unlucky infants who entered the world on the Sabbath were sometimes denied baptism because of their parents’ presumed sin in copulating on a Sunday. For many years Sudbury’s minister Israel Loring sternly refused to baptize children born on Sunday, until one terrible Sabbath when his own wife gave birth to twins!18 Altogether, the Puritans created a sabbatical rhythm of unique intensity in the time ways of their culture.19”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“There was no heat in these buildings, partly because the earliest meetinghouses also served as powder magazines, and fires threatened to blow the entire congregation to smithereens. They were bitter cold in winter. Many tales were told of frozen communion bread, frostbitten fingers, baptisms performed with chunks of ice and entire congregations with chattering teeth that sounded like a field of crickets. It was a point of honor for the minister never to shorten a service merely because his audience was frozen. But sometimes the entire congregation would begin to stamp its feet to restore circulation until the biblical rebuke came crashing down upon them: “STAND STILL and consider the wonderous work of God.” Later generations built “nooning houses” or “sab-baday houses” near the church where the congregation could thaw out after the morning sermon and prepare for the long afternoon sermon to come. But unheated meetings remained a regional folkway for two hundred years.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“Fiddlesticks!” Rall replied. “These clodhoppers will not attack us, and should they do so, we will simply fall on them and rout them.”58 (on describing that they had nothing to fear from the COlonists of New Jersey before the night of December 25, 1776; when Washington and his men crossed the Deleware.)”
― David Hackett Fischer

“Many activities were forbidden on the Sabbath: work, play, and unnecessary travel. Even minor instances of Sabbath-breaking were punished with much severity. The Essex County Court indicted a man for carrying a burden on the Sabbath, and punished a woman for brewing on the Lord’s Day. When Ebenezer Taylor of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, fell into a forty-foot well, his rescuers stopped digging on Saturday afternoon while they debated whether it was lawful to rescue him on the Sabbath. Other”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“That case was not unique in the sexual history of New Haven. When a second deformed pig was born in that troubled town, another unfortunate eccentric was also accused of bestiality by his neighbors. Even though he could not be convicted under the two-witness rule, he was imprisoned longer than anybody else in the history of the colony. When yet a third defective piglet was born with one red eye and what appeared to be a penis growing out of its head, the magistrates compelled everyone in town to view it in hopes of catching the malefactor. The people of New Haven seem to have been perfectly obsessed by fear of unnatural sex. When a dog belonging to Nicholas Bayly was observed trying to copulate with a sow, neighbors urged that it be killed. Mrs. Bayly refused and incautiously made a joke of it, saying of her dog, “if he had not a bitch, he must have something.” The magistrates of New Haven were not amused. Merely for making light of bestiality, the Baylys were banished from the town.12”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“It was typical of Washington’s style of leadership to present a promising proposal as someone else’s idea, rather than his own.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing

“This idea of collective liberty also was expressed in many bizarre obligations which New England towns collectively imposed upon their members. Eastham’s town meeting, for example, ordered that no single man could marry until he had killed six blackbirds or three crows. Every town book contained many such rules.4 The General Court also passed sweeping statutes which allowed the magistrates to suppress almost any act, by any means. One such law, for example, threatened that “if any man shall exceed the bounds of moderation, we shall punish him severely.” The definition of “exceeding the bounds of moderation” was left to the magistrate.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“We never let go of a belief once fixed in our minds" quoted by an Appalachian women with an air of pride.' (This quote explains a lot about my family)”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“threatened. As late as 1775, townsmen within twenty miles of the sea were urged to carry arms to church lest godless British raiding parties surprise them while at worship. After the service, the men left the meeting first—a regional folkway that continued long after its military origins had been forgotten.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine began. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing

“The problem is to explain the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws, individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“To a modern mind, hegemonic liberty is an idea at war with itself.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“Every Canadian winter was a mortal challenge to its habitants.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Champlain's Dream

“American ideas of freedom developed from indigenous folkways which were deeply rooted in the inherited culture of the English-speaking world.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“One of the few points of agreement between Anglican Virginians and Puritan New Englanders was their common loathing of Quakers.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“In every American generation, small minorities with strong material interests have often succeeded in stopping urgent reforms, against the will of the majority.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“When one southerner was asked why so many people were killed in his region, he answered that “there were just more folks in the South that needed killing.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“In American history, racism has not been a constant but a variable which came, went and came again.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“One pro-slavery writer in New York spoke for many slave owners when he said that emancipation and civil rights for freed slaves would be “the total subversion of OUR liberties.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“New England later attracted large numbers of Catholic Irish, Italians, Jews, Armenians, and others. Each of these many ethnic groups cherished its own heritage. At the same time, they also became New Englanders. They lived in Yankee houses, grew accustomed to town meetings, began to talk like Yankees, and learned to play by Yankee rules.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“Whenever a culture exists for many generations in conditions of chronic insecurity, it develops an ethic that exalts war above work, force above reason, and men above women.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“In terms of class, for example, the dominant elite in one section tended to ally itself with the proletariat in the other.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

“Mumbett also had another family of her own. Her great-grandson was W. E. B. Du Bois. In his writings, he remembered her with pride, as an inspiration for his stellar career in American and world history.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“From the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, six generations of American scholars were mostly Whig historians of their nation. Their work tended to center on ideas of liberty and freedom, equal rights and republican self-government. Major themes were the triumph of those ideas and institutions over tyranny and slavery.”
― David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals

“The same cultural values which caused secession were also partly responsible for its eventual defeat.”
― David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America