Quotes from Jill Lepore

Between 1900 and 1930, the percentage of PhDs awarded to women doubled, and then, for three decades, it fell.6 The gains made by women in the beginning of the twentieth century were lost, everywhere, as women who had fought their way into colleges and graduate programs found that they were barred from the top ranks of the academy. No structural changes had been made that would have allowed women to pursue a life of the mind while raising children: many quit; many were kicked out; most gave up.

Superman first bounded over tall buildings in 1938. Batman began lurking in the shadows in 1939. Wonder Woman landed in her invisible plane in 1941.

He counted thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility. Soon

The virtue she valued most was faith. It had no place on Franklin's list. She placed her trust in Providence. He placed his faith in man.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said Lippmann's pieces were like flypaper: "If I touch it, I am stuck till I finish it.

Is progress the progress of Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's 1678 allegory—the journey of a Christian from sin to salvation? Is progress the extension of suffrage, the spread of democracy? Or is progress invention, the invention of new machines?

It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states' rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.

Girls are important: "Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.

By the 1980s, influenced by the psychology and popular culture of trauma, the Left had abandoned solidarity across difference in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering, a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity. The Right, if it didn't describe itself as engaging in identity politics, adopted the same model: the NRA, notably, cultivated the resentments and grievances of white men

By the Collision of different Sentiments," Franklin wrote, "Sparks of Truth are struck out, and political Light is obtained.

Jewish refugees trying to flee to the United States found themselves blocked by a grotesque paradox: Nazi law mandated that no Jew could take more than four dollars out of the country; American immigration laws banned anyone "likely to become a public charge.

The past is what's written down. It is very quiet; only people who can write make any sound at all.

In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

Right wrongs no man.

Liberalism is still in there. The trick is getting it out. There's only one way to do that. It requires grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment, guaranteed by a nation of laws. This requires making the case for the nation.

To love this particular nation is to love the world. This paradox lies within all forms of liberal nationalism. A liberal nation is a nation to which anyone who affirms its civic ideals belongs.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

The only difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England, Franklin joked, is that the former is infallible while the latter is never in the wrong.

As James Madison explained, the Constitution is "of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed Ã¢â'¬Â¦ THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES.

Before 1492, Europe suffered from scarcity and famine. After 1492, the vast wealth carried to Europe from the Americas and extracted by the forced labor of Africans granted governments new powers that contributed to the rise of nation-states.

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous Customs in the world, considering us as a Civilised and a Christian Countrey, that we deny the advantages of Learning to Women." Like

the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice. The origins of that idea, and its fate, are the story of American history.

He eyed his class of Harvard men sternly. "Girls are also human beings," he told them, "a point often overlooked!!"17

The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests, too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching. Its founders agreed with the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who wrote, in 1748, that "Records of Wars, Intrigues, Factions, and Revolutions are so many Collections of Experiments."9 They believed that truth is to be found in ideas about morality but also in the study of history.