Alice Morse Earle

Alice Morse Earle (born April 27, 1851, Worcester, Mass., U.S.—died Feb. 16, 1911, Hempstead, Long Island, N.Y.) was an American writer and antiquarian whose work centred on the manners, customs, and handicrafts of various periods of American history.

Alice Morse married Henry Earle of New York in 1874. Her writing career began in 1890 when, at the suggestion of her father, she wrote an article on old Sabbath customs at her forebears’ church in Chester, Vermont, for the Youth’s Companion. The next year an expanded version of the article was published by The Atlantic Monthly, and later in 1891 she published her first book, The Sabbath in Puritan New England, which enjoyed considerable success.

Earle’s interest in her own family’s past and in antiques of the colonial period, supplemented by tireless research, provided impetus and material for a great many more articles and books over the next several years, among them China Collecting in America (1892), Customs and Fashions in Old New England (1893), Colonial Dames and Goodwives (1895), Colonial Days in Old New York (1896), In Old Narragansett: Romances and Realities (1898), Child Life in Colonial Days (1899), Old Time Gardens (1901), and Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620–1820 (1903). She also edited, worked on a compilation of early writing, and contributed to Historic New York (1897) and Chap-Book Essays (1897). Her historical research and writing emphasized the homely details of everyday life rather than the world of politics and affairs, and her popular exposition of her findings helped spark a renewal of public interest in the American past. In January 1909 she nearly drowned when the ship on which she meant to sail to Egypt was struck by another and wrecked near the Nantucket lightship; her health never recovered from that incident.