Jill Lepore
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.Collection: History
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.Collection: Imagination
Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.Collection: Computers
Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.
Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.
Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.
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.
Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.
Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.
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.
Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption.
History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.
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.
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.
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.
A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.
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.
Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.
In antihistory, time is an illusion.
The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.
No nation has a single history, no people a single song.
When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.
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.
Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
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.
History is only written from what remains.
My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.
Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name.
The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don't think they've ever gotten untangled.
One day, I was playing 'The Game of Life,' the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn't quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different.
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.
In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.
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.
Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.
Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.
If you know a lot about something and apply that information to a vote that matches your policy preferences, your opinion quality is high.
Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.
'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.
'Doctor Who' began as family television: a show that kids and their parents and grandparents can all watch, maybe even together, on the sofa.
'Doctor Who' is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain's role in the world as its empire unravelled.
Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.
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.
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.