Ashley Jacobs

“If modern-day Americans want to be historically accurate, then their gratitude at Thanksgiving should be directed to the Old World pathogens that made the settlement of Plymouth Colony possible.”
― Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

“There’s an honesty to these places, if you’re willing to look, because the dead don’t have a deceitful bone in their bodies.”
― Greg Melville, Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America's Cemeteries

“Salem has long embodied a contradiction in the bedrock of American consciousness: upright piety mixed with hypocrisy, sober religion mixed with violent hysteria. Hawthorne’s own great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was one of the judges who presided over the Salem witch trials of 1692, and Nathaniel had grown up knowing about the family legend—that one of Hathorne’s victims had cursed him and his descendants.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“Before the nearest cell tower seared its insidious electrical tentacles into her skull and she could no longer think for herself.”
― Clay McLeod Chapman, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes