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
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.
order epidemics stories
Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.
world citizens kindergarten
In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.
roots century made
Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.
father would-be records
Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone. If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by the earth.
illusion
In antihistory, time is an illusion.