Quotes from Jill Lepore

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."33

Taking his inspiration from Edmund Burke, Kirk urged those who disagreed with liberalism's fundamental tenets to call themselves "conservatives" (rather than "classical liberals," in the nineteenth-century laissez-faire sense).

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.

Early Menstruation renders the Uteri Hard & dry; so that they ought not to prompt the early appearance by obscene books, and frequent touchings.

debates staged that year between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas proved to be the greatest argument over the American experiment since the constitutional convention. Those debates didn't avert the coming war between the

Simulacra and Simulation, a metatext about the meaningless "hell of simulation.

Mr. President," he began, addressing Washington, "I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them." He suggested that he might, one day, change his mind. "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

Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.

After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson's draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words "sacred and undeniable," and suggested that "these truths" were, instead, "self-evident." This was mroe than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science.

would in my will, leave my skin a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment and then bind the Constitution of glorious happy and free America."17 Americans' deepest and most abiding divide turned on this starkly different reading of their Constitution, in what meaning lay between the ink written onto parchment and the scars etched on a black man's back.

As the years passed, and Madison grew old, he observed how many other nations had followed the United States' lead and written their own constitutions: France, Haiti, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland. By 1820, at least sixty constitutions had been written in Europe alone; eighty more would be written by 1850. Very few of those constitutions lasted.18

Münsterberg came to believe that there is no better psychological laboratory than a nickelodeon, in much the same way that Marston later came to believe that there is no better form of psychological propaganda than a comic book.

She found, in visits, relief from the aches of old age. "I have Even in my self in times Past Lost the snse of Paine for some time by the Injoyment of good Company." She

Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Many a Man would have been worse, if his Estate had been better.19

Of the more than two hundred black churches and homes that had been bombed in the South since 1948, more bombs had gone off in Birmingham than in any other city.

a judge in Vermont ruled in favor of a runaway slave whose master had produced a bill of sale proving his ownership: the judge said in order to retain his property in the form of another man he'd have to provide a bill of sale from "God Almighty." 17

Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime.

But the university has obligations, too, to freedom of speech, whose premise, however idealized, is that, in a battle between truth and error, truth, in an open field will always win. If the commitment to these difficult freedoms has sometimes flagged...it has just as often been renewed. Free speech is not a week or a place. It is a long and strenuous argument, as maddening as the past and as painful as the truth.

I'm not saying such facts are unimportant, only that they didn't interest me and that I had to learn them. So I made arrangements to procure some hydro-cyanic acid from a chemist friend."12

The Mercy of some of these Men is Cruelty itself," he wrote. "It were better for us and the Indians also, that we had no Liberty.

IN 1493, WHEN COLUMBUS returned from his unimaginable voyage, a Spanish-born pope granted all of the lands on the other side of the ocean, everything west of a line of longitude some three hundred miles west of Cape Verde, to Spain, and granted what lay east of that line, western Africa, to Portugal, the pope claiming the authority to divvy up lands inhabited by tens of millions of people as if he were the god of Genesis.

The turn from reverence to inquiry, from mystery to history, was crucial to the founding of the United States.

How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?"2