Alice Morse Earle
Alice Morse Earle (April 27, 1851 – February 16, 1911) was an American historian and author from Worcester, Massachusetts.
She was christened Mary Alice by her parents Edwin Morse and Abby Mason Clary. On 15 April 1874, she married Henry Earle of New York City with whom she had 4 children, including the botanical illustrator Alice Clary Earle Hyde. She changed her name from Mary Alice Morse to Alice Morse Earle. Her writings, beginning in 1890, focused on small sociological details rather than grand details, and thus are invaluable for modern social historians. She wrote a number of books on colonial America (and especially the New England region) such as Curious Punishments of Bygone Days.
She was a passenger aboard the RMS Republic when, while in a dense fog, that ship collided with the SS Florida. During the transfer of passengers, Alice fell into the water. Her near drowning in 1909 off the coast of Nantucket during this abortive trip to Egypt weakened her health sufficiently that she died two years later, in Hempstead, Long Island.
Partial bibliography
Library resources about Alice Morse Earle |
By Alice Morse Earle |
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- The Sabbath in Puritan New England (1891)
- China Collecting in America (1892)
- Home Life in Colonial Days (1893)
- Customs and Fashions in Old New England (1893)
- Diary of Anna Green Winslow, A Boston School Girl of 1771 (1894)
- Costume of Colonial Times (1894)
- Colonial Dames and Goodwives (1895)
- Margaret Winthrop (1895)
- Colonial Days in Old New York (1896)
- Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896)
- In Old Narragansett: Romances and Realities (1898)
- Child Life in Colonial Days (1899)
- Stagecoach and Tavern Days at www.quinnipiac.edu Stagecoach and Tavern Days (1900) or at Internet Archive
- Old Time Gardens (1901)
- Sun Dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902)
- Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620–1820 (2 vols., 1903)
Further reading
- "Alice Morse Earle," in Notable American Women: Volume 1. 4th ed., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975.
- Susan Reynolds Williams, Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early America. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.
- 1851 births
- 1911 deaths
- 19th-century American historians
- American non-fiction crime writers
- American women historians
- 20th-century American historians
- Writers from Worcester, Massachusetts
- Women crime writers
- 20th-century American women writers
- 19th-century American women writers
- Historians from Massachusetts
- Daughters of the American Revolution people