Quotes from Jill Lepore

It has often been said, in the twenty-first century and in earlier centuries, too, that Americans lack a shared past and that, built on a cracked foundation, the Republic is crumbling.

in 1911, an "Amazon" meant any woman rebel—which, to a lot of people, meant any girl who left home and went to college.

Between 1941 and 1946, the federal government spent more than it had from 1789 to 1941.

In 1880, clerks made up less than 5 percent of the nation's workforce, nearly all of them men; by 1910, more than four million Americans worked in offices, and half were women. By 1920, most Americans lived and worked in cities.

It seems to me unthinkable that a man with his background of slander, abuse, innuendo, expediency and resort to all the most devious political devices should ever occupy an office which we have tried for generations to exalt in the esteem of young people and the world

Marston liked to say that Wonder Woman was meant to be "psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world," but neither he nor Gaines seem to have given much thought to hiring a woman to draw her.

Before the revival began, a scant one in ten Americans were church members; by the time it ended, that ratio had risen to eight in ten.

The only way to answer the question "Are things getting better or are they getting worse?" is to discover whether modern man knows more or is wiser than his ancestors, Weaver argued. And his answer to this question was no. With the scientific revolution, "facts"—particular explanations for how the world works—had replaced "truth"—a general understanding of the meaning of its existence.

Thirteen million new homes were built in the United States during the 1950s; eleven million of them were built in the suburbs. Eighty-three percent of all population growth in the 1950s took place in the suburbs. For every two blacks who moved to the cities, three whites moved out. The postwar racial order created a segregated landscape: black cities, white suburbs

In 1885, an American economist tried to reckon the extraordinary transformation wrought by what was now 200,000 miles of railroad, more than in all of Europe. It was possible to move one ton of freight one mile for less than seven-tenths of one cent, "a sum so small," he wrote, "that outside of China it would be difficult to find a coin of equivalent value to give a boy as a reward for carrying an ounce package across a street.

Lange, who had been stricken by polio at the age of seven and walked with a painful limp, had become famous for the achingly sympathetic photographs she'd taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. "Cripples know about each other," she said of her ability to capture suffering on film.

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, "only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice," Montaigne observed

Detective Comics first appeared in 1937. Superman, written and drawn by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, made his debut in Action Comics #1 in June 1938. Superman was unstoppable; soon, a million Superman comics were being sold every month.45

Wrote a skeptical E. B. White: "Although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs.")

In 1934, after Upton Sinclair was defeated in his campaign to become the next governor of California, he labeled the advertising concern that defeated him a "lie factory." Marston took much the same view. One of Wonder Woman's most sinister adversaries, the Duke of Deception, runs an advertising firm called the Lie Factory.

Most of what once existed is gone... Nature takes one toll, malice another... most of what historians study survives because it was purposely kept... (it) is called the historical record, & it is maddeningly uneven, asymmetrical, & unfair.

How do people reconcile themselves to war's worst cruelties?

One debate merged religion and politics. What were the political consequences of the idea of the equality of souls? Could the soul of America be redeemed from the nation's original sin, the Constitution's sanctioning of slavery?

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory. —Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 1952

Another debate merged politics and technology. Could the nation's new democratic traditions survive in the

The Confederacy's newly elected vice president, a frail Georgian named Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he made those differences starkly clear. The ideas that lie behind the Constitution "rested upon the assumption of the equality of races," Stephens said

In 1991, Warren Burger called the new interpretation of the Second Amendment "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

relieved no one of the obligation to judge right from wrong. But it did require subjecting the past to skepticism, to look to beginnings not to justify ends, but to question them—with evidence.