Quotes from Jill Lepore

The person of faith cannot accept reason as the arbiter of truth without giving up on faith...

The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation and equality were wholly separate ideas. "We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon

Muller v. Oregon established the constitutionality of labor laws (for women), the legitimacy of sex discrimination in employment, and the place of social science research in the decisions of the courts.

Before 1919, Mexicans who entered the United States at the border did not need to apply for entry.

And so began a vicious economic spiral. "It's a marvel, looking back on it now," Lippmann would later write ruefully, "that we could ever have so completely thought that a boom under such treacherous conditions was permanent."126

He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it)." People

In much of Africa, labor, not land, constituted the sole form of property recognized by law, a form of consolidating wealth and generating revenue, which meant that African states tended to be be small and that, while European wars were fought for land, African wars were fought for labor.

John Adams told him. "And if you do not rise . . . to the head of your country, it will be owing to your own Laziness, Slovenliness, and Obstinancy." 65

In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, did not attack us, and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have," wrote Pat Buchanan, placing the blame for the war on the neocons' hijacking of the conservative movement

The only way to justify this contradiction, the only way to explain how one kind of people are born free while another kind of people are not, would be to sow a new seed, an ideology of race. It would take a long time to grow, and longer to wither.

Karl Marx began making predictions about the consequences of capitalism. He saw in the increase in the production of goods a decrease in the value of labor and a widening inequality between the rich and the poor.

Europeans lived] in dense, settled populations- cities- where human & animal waste breeds vermin, like mice and rats and roaches. Most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, though, didn't live in dense settlements, and even those who lived in villages tended to move with the seasons, taking apart their towns and rebuilding them somewhere else. They didn't accumulate filth, and they didn't live crowds. They suffered from very few infectious diseases.

Upshur believed that slavery solved the problem of the tensions between capital and labor by giving even a white man of desperate circumstances a reason to accept the economic order: "However poor, or ignorant or miserable he may be, he has yet the consoling consciousness that there is a still lower condition to which he can never be reduced."5 Tyler

The telling of history is, by its very nature, controversial, contentious, and contested; it advances by debate. This doesn't make history squishy, vague, and irrelevant. It makes it picky, demanding, and vital.

POPULISTS' GRIEVANCES WERE many, and bitter. Their best-founded objection was their concern about the federal government's support of the interests of businesses over those of labor.

To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.

No woman can be gotten with child without some knowledg, consent and delight in the acting thereof." Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven, From May, 1653, to the Union (Hartford: Case, Lockwood, 1858), 123;

There were about three million people on that island, land of mountains, when Columbus landed; fifty years later, there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung.

Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.

Nearly as soon as the war with Mexico began, members of Congress began debating what to do when it ended. They spat venom. They pulled guns. They unsheathed knives. Divisions of party were abandoned; the splinter in Congress was sectional. Before heading to the Capitol every morning, southern congressmen strapped bowie knives to their belts and tucked pistols into their pockets. Northerners, on principle, came unarmed.

On July 11, Wilson asked why, if slaves were admitted as people, they weren't "admitted as Citizens." And "then why are they not admitted on an equality with White Citizens?" And, if they weren't admitted as people, "Are they admitted as property? Then why is not other property admitted into the computation?

Nowhere do the words "slave" or "slavery" appear in the final document. "What will be said of this new principle of founding a right to govern Freemen on a power derived from slaves," Pennsylvania's John Dickinson wondered—correctly, as it would turn out. He predicted: "The omitting the Word will be regarded as an Endeavour to conceal a principle of which we are ashamed."49

the Constitution considered people of African descent "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." No "negro of the African race," he ruled, could ever claim the rights and privileges of citizenship

Secessionists were attempting to build a modern, proslavery, antidemocratic state. In order to wage a war, the leaders of this fundamentally antidemocratic state needed popular support. Such support was difficult to gain and impossible to maintain. The Confederacy therefore suppressed dissent.