Home Life in Colonial Days

Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911) was an American historian and author from Worcester, Massachusetts, who wrote a number of books on Colonial America (and especially the New England region) such as Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1874). In 1874, she married Henry Earle of New York, changing 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 sociologists. A near drowing in 1909 off the coast of Nantucket during an abortive trip to Egypt weakened her health sufficiently that she died two years later, in Hempstead, Long Island. Her works include: The Sabbath in Puritan New England (1891), China Collecting in America (1892), Costumes and Fashions in Old New England (1893), Early Prose and Verse (1893), Colonial Dames and Good Wives (1895), Margaret Winthrop (1896) and Two Centuries of Costume in America 1620-1820 (1903).