After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.
I consider myself a writer who happens to write about history, rather than a historian. I was an English major in college. What I've learned about history is in the field, so to speak. Going into the archives and working with it directly.
Washington worked very hard to create his legacy. Even before the War of Independence was over, he was assembling his papers and making sure they were going to be in a state of preservation that would represent as best he could the official side of what occurred during the Revolution.
Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see figures from the past as caricatures - either all good or all bad - when the truth is always much more complex.
He was born in 1741, a descendant of the Rhode Island equivalent of royalty. The first Benedict Arnold had been one of the colony's founders, and subsequent generations had helped to establish the Arnolds as solid and respected citizens.
As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.
I was an English major at Brown. I never enjoyed history classes.
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.
If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history.
I watch a lot of bad TV. I spend my entire day reading and writing, and after dinner my idea of fun is just to watch a lot of bad TV. That's how I relax and stay in touch with modern culture.
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.
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.
'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.
In my early 20s, I was a big fan of Theodore Dreiser and might be one of the few people on the planet who have voluntarily read all his novels.
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.
Whaling was the oil business of its day.
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.
