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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.