American - Historian | January 17, 1916 - July 8, 2013
Washington presided at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and is often credited with its success. But he had no known part in drafting its provisions.
Edmund Morgan
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Throughout his long career, Washington earned the adulation not merely of ordinary people but of the other luminaries whom we now hail as 'founding fathers.'
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There is something about guns that inhibits understanding. It is not just that they can put an end to argument. They somehow generate beliefs that are obviously contrary to observable fact.
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The musket could not be aimed except in a general direction; a bow in the hands of a skilled archer could regularly hit and kill an enemy completely beyond musket range.
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The musket, always a muzzleloader, took minutes to reload; an archer could aim and fire up to a dozen arrows in a minute. Muskets required continual cleaning and repair; bows were quickly made and easily maintained.
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In 1595, by order of the Privy Council, the English armed services abandoned the longbow and fought with muskets for the next two centuries and more. Nobody is sure why.
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Liberty had many friends in the eighteenth century.
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Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.
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Americans, perhaps more than most people, have pondered the question of who they are and what their country is.
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What was the American Revolution? The people who joined to carry it out had different views of what they had done.
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Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
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No one escapes from the past without bearing some of its burdens.
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