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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I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.
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'Doctor Who' is the most original science-fiction television series ever made. It is also one of the longest-running television shows of all time.
presidents
Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.
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Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.
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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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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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Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.
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One thing that always frustrated me was that, while Benjamin Franklin's was the best-known face of the eighteenth century, no one ever took his sister's likeness.
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As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid.
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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.
illusion
In antihistory, time is an illusion.
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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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'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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Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.