One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past.

Nathaniel Philbrick

We've got a yawl named the Phebe, which is named for a boat in a whaling journal my father and I edited. We keep a copy of the journal on board.

Nathaniel Philbrick

There's an ugly civil war side to revolutionary Boston that we don't often talk about and a lot of thuggish, vigilante behavior by groups like the Sons of Liberty.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Right whales - so named because they were 'the right whale to kill' - grazed the waters off Nantucket as if they were seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Nantucket's English settlers, who first disembarked on the island in 1659, had been mindful of the sea's dangers. They had hoped to earn their livelihoods not as fishermen but as farmers and shepherds on this grassy isle dotted with ponds, where no wolves preyed.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Whatever you read, there's no better place to read than the cockpit or the berth of a boat. It's kind of like being in a womb.

Nathaniel Philbrick

I don't subscribe to the idea that the founders or anyone else were somehow better than us and that we have to live up to their example.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart.

Nathaniel Philbrick

'Johnny Tremain,' Paul Revere's Ride, today's Tea Partiers - you have to tune all that out to get at the real story.

Nathaniel Philbrick

XTC is my favorite band; I'm a huge Neil Young fan, Jayhawks, all that type of stuff. I like Death Cab for Cutie, also Ryan Adams. I try to impress my children: 'Have you listened to such-and-such?' They're not impressed.

Nathaniel Philbrick

History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is.

Nathaniel Philbrick

'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.

Nathaniel Philbrick

As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.

Nathaniel Philbrick

I was an English major at Brown. I never enjoyed history classes.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Some of my books sort of have a provocative take. Sometimes you find interesting things about characters that show they weren't necessarily the way people usually see them. It can make for lively conversations, but that's great. Spark a little controversy, get people to think about it. That's what it's all about.

Nathaniel Philbrick

We think of Washington as the defensive-minded pragmatist who won the Revolution by avoiding unnecessary risks on the battlefield. But that was not how he started out.

Nathaniel Philbrick

To my mind, an adventure is something a person willingly undertakes.

Nathaniel Philbrick

For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Whaling was the oil business of its day.

Nathaniel Philbrick

It is impossible to say when 37-year-old Benedict Arnold first met 18-year-old Peggy Shippen, but we do know that on September 25, 1778, he wrote her a love letter - much of it an exact copy of one he'd sent to another woman six months before. But if the overheated rhetoric was recycled, Arnold's passion was genuine.

Nathaniel Philbrick