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
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My mother liked to command me to do things I found scary. I always wanted to stay home and read. My mother only ever wanted me to get away.
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An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.
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The very first television ad targeted to women was produced by the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign in 1956. It includes footage of a woman supervising her children doing their homework at the kitchen table.
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Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine.
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Weirdly, there have been a lot of critics of conservatism, but very few critics of innovation. As a culture, we are deeply paranoid about politics, but we gaze upon innovation with rapturous adulation.
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It feels silly to watch endless hours of winter sports every four years, when we never watch them any other time, and we don't even understand the rules, which doesn't stop us from scoring everyone, every run, every skate, every race.
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Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.
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When I was a kid, I used to deliver the newspaper all over town, cramming papers between screen doors and into mailboxes and under doormats.
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Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.
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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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History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.
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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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We have discharged one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We find only that we forget, when times are good, that times were ever bad.
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Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.