Jill Lepore Quotes
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Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin's granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine - oil on canvas - in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother's house.
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Clarence Darrow, America's best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history's most skilled orators.
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No nation has a single history, no people a single song.
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Fox News's coverage of 9/11 and the war in Iraq improved its ratings, demonstrated its influence, and intensified the controversy over its practices.
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Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.
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In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.
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'Doctor Who' is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain's role in the world as its empire unravelled.
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Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.
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Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren't often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.
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Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.
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Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.
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My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.
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Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.
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'Doctor Who' began as family television: a show that kids and their parents and grandparents can all watch, maybe even together, on the sofa.
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History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.
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A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.
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The idea that debt is necessary for trade, and has to be forgiven, is consequent to the rise of a market economy. The idea that debt is wrong and should be punished is a feature of a moral economy.
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Historians once assumed that when childhood mortality was high, people must not have loved their children very much; it would have been too painful. Research has since proved that assumption wrong.
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In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off.
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Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.
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The Olympics is an imperfect interregnum, the parade of nations a fantasy about a peace never won. It offers little relief from strife and no harbor from terror.
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Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.
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History is only written from what remains.
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In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock.