@AE I find it very

Hard to reconcile anything sane with all hints, especially first. Brute force won't go

Far

(I have problem with my keyboard so ignore broken line) The 9 "!" In 13 sentence ending makes me very suspicious of Morse. I tried it, it didn't work, maybe somehow taking ' or , or ... or -- might help.

Also, very coincidentally 9 out of 13 sentence ending are 5 letter long.

The first hint is historically most important, but I have no sane clues regarding it.