Quotes from Jill Lepore

In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.

Pretend that you are the Voice of the People. Whitaker and Baxter bought radio ads, sponsored by "the Citizens Committee Against the Recall," in which an ominous voice said: "The real issue is whether the City Hall is to be turned over, lock, stock, and barrel, to an unholy alliance fronting for a faceless man." (The recall was defeated.) Attack, attack, attack. Said Whitaker: "You can't wage a defensive campaign and win!" Never underestimate

Writing in 1837, one Michigan reformer called the nation's rate of immigration "the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.

Cities and counties in the North and West passed racial zoning laws, banning blacks from the middle-class communities. In 1890, in Montana, blacks lived in all fifty-six counties in the state; by 1930, they'd been confined to just eleven.

Southern slave owners, a tiny minority of Americans, amounting to about 1 percent of the population, deployed the rhetoric of states' rights and free trade (by which they meant trade free from federal government regulation), but in fact they desperately needed and relied on the power of the federal government to defend and extend the institution of slavery.

In 1972, political scientist Leo Bogart demonstrated that most of what polls do is manufacture opinion, given that a sizable portion of Americans know nothing or nearly nothing or else hold no opinion about the subjects and issues raised. "The first question a pollster should ask," Bogart wrote, is "' Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?

understanding history as a form of inquiry—not as something easy or comforting but as something demanding and exhausting—was central to the nation's founding.

In Norfolk, Virginia, four thousand slaves—who, living in a border state that was not part of the Confederacy, were not actually freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—

They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together. We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us. —Abraham Lincoln, "Fragments on Government," 1854

Dependence begets subservience and venality," he wrote. There was something romantic, too, in Jefferson's attachment to farming: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." Influenced by

Can literacy destroy?

Liberals argued for progress; conservatives argued for a return to the nation's founding principles. Change is a founding principle, too, but people divided by schism are blind to what they share: one half, infallible; the other, never wrong.

The most crucial right established under Magna Carta was the right to a trial by jury. For centuries, guilt or innocence had been determined, across Europe, either by a trial by ordeal—a trial by water, for instance, or a trial by fire—or by trial by combat. Trials by ordeal and combat required neither testimony nor questioning. The outcome was, itself, the evidence, the only admissible form of judicial proof, accepted because it placed judgment in the hands of God.

Many wars had to do with religion, and because many slaves were prisoners of war, slaves and their owners tended to be people of different faiths: Christians enslaved Jews; Muslims enslaved

the world, that unknown utopia, a name: he labeled it "America.

At trial, the judge said, "We are at war and you should not bother the president."3

FDR's solicitor general said the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun; it had to do with the common defense. The court agreed, unanimously.2

As soon as the curious Pequots came within range, the interpreter "pulls up his cock and let fly at one of them, and without question was the death of him."32 When

English migrants often came as families and they sometimes came as whole towns, hoping to found a Christian commonwealth, a religious community bound to the common wealth of all, public good over private gain. "The care of the public must oversway all private respects," Winthrop said. "For it is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public." They expected the world to be watching. "The eyes of all people are upon us

But James Madison had pointed out that since "the right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States . . . the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes." That is, in a direct election, the North, which had more voters, would have more votes. Wilson's proposal was defeated, 12 states to

Masculine systems."77 That women were left out of the nation's founding documents, and out of its founders' idea of civil society, considered, like slaves, to be confined to a state of nature, would trouble the political order for centuries.

At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without compulsory health insurance," the Yale economist Irving Fisher pointed out in 1916.

an embittered Jefferson would suggest that newspapers ought to be divided into four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies.)

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable," Jefferson began, "that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments