Quotes from Jill Lepore

in 1916, only 16 percent of Americans lived in homes with electricity, but by 1927, that percentage had risen to 63.118

Those who are by nature possessions are those who have a lesser capacity for reason; these people "are by nature slaves," Aristotle wrote, "and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master."40

The minutes of white-collar workers' lives were tapped out by typewriters and adding machines. They had the cheerfulness of robots, having lost the capacity to feel anything except boredom.

Massachusetts's poor laws required that boys be taught to write and girls to read.7

To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind. Stories are full of power and force; they seethe with meaning, with truths and lies, evasions and honesty. Speech often has far more weight and urgency than writing. But most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts, a point observed early in the seventeenth century by an English vicar named Samuel Purchas.

In Louisiana, black voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 5,300 in 1908, and to 730 in 1910.

Fiction is the history of the obscure.

One Republican said, "I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth," even though in every case, when he read a transcript of the speech in the newspaper the next day, he "disagreed with almost all of it.

Most Americans had only ever heard national political candidates shouting, trying to project their voices across a banquet hall or a football field. Hearing Roosevelt speak quietly and calmly, as if he were sitting across the kitchen table, having a reasonable argument with you, earned him Americans' dedicated affection. "It was a God-given gift," his wife said. He "could talk to people so that they felt he was talking to them individually.

To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past. "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched," Jefferson conceded. But when they do, "They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.

every age has its folly

But beneath the cheerful gurgle of the percolating electric coffeepot could be heard a muffled thrum of despair. It began with a fear of the perils of prosperity:

It certainly wasn't the chronicle of a king. The yere of our Lord 1537 was a prince born to king Harry th'eight. It was, instead, the story of a poor boy who learns to read and comes to know as much of politics as a prince. This

Wonder Woman' was conceived by Dr. Marston to set up a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; and to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations, and professions monopolized by men." She wasn't meant to be a superwoman; she was meant to be an everywoman.

In Middle English, a frankeleyn is a free man, an owner of land but not of title: neither a serf nor a peasant but not a nobleman, either. There

The democratization of American politics was hastened by revivalists like Stewart who believed in the salvation of the individual through good works and in the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Against that belief stood the stark and brutal realities of an industrializing age, the grinding of souls.

The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high. It is no accident that the Constitution does not mention God.

To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past.

The 1880 census had taken eight years to tabulate. But in 1890, the Census Bureau's Herman Hollerith, an engineer from Buffalo, New York, who'd taught mechanical engineering at MIT, introduced a reform that allowed for the census to be tallied in just a year.

Either hide this well or destroy it. It was the family motto.

mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately

political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.

If he had never created Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston would be remembered for this experiment. He invented the lie detector test. A century on, it's still in use. It's also all over Wonder Woman.

I imagine there are few, if any, in the World, so weake as to imagine, that the little Good we can do here, can merit so vast a Reward hereafter. There