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.
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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.
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No nation has a single history, no people a single song.
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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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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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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.
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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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Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.
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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.
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Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
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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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'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.
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'Doctor Who' began as family television: a show that kids and their parents and grandparents can all watch, maybe even together, on the sofa.