Alice Morse Earle

Alice Morse Earle (1851–1911) was an American historian of everyday life in colonial New England and New York. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, she began writing after her marriage, and between 1891 and 1903 she published seventeen books, including The Sabbath in Puritan New England, Colonial Dames and Good Wives, Child Life in Colonial Days, Home Life in Colonial Days and Two Centuries of Costume in America. She worked from diaries, wills, inventories, sermons and surviving objects rather than from political records, and she helped found the study of material culture and women's history in the United States. She survived a shipwreck in 1909 but never fully recovered.