Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore
Jill Leporeis an American historian. She is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
CountryUnited States of America
college companies dying employees graduates hire laid last left might students tech work worked
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.
castle four lived nineteen owned william
In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities.
ancient crops medieval paid taxing trade
In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state.
choices republican democrat
Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.
saved
Disrupt, and you will be saved.
thinking hands personality
We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.
book sleep written
Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.
four pages facts
A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.
beautiful men ugly-man
Why do beautiful women love ugly men?
interesting long argument
History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.
epidemiology disease sides
Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.
loyalty mother determination
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.
epidemics patterns disease
Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.
generations mouths down-and
Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.