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Jill Lepore Biography

Jill Lepore (born August 27, 1966) is an American historian. She is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.

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Jill Lepore Quotes

When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood NOT as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

Civilian, Defense, Failure, Left, Littles, Self

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories arent often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

Epidemics, Havoc, Order, Resistance, Stories, Wreaking

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

Beautiful, Love, Men, Ugly

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

Disease, Epidemiology, Side, Sides

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

Argument, Art, Evidence, Past, Risks, Writing

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

Die, Diseases, Epidemics, Patterns, Spread, Viruses

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

Book, Books, Old, Tree, Way

You can be strong as any boy if you'll work hard and train yourself in athletics, the way boys do.

Athletics, Boys, Hard, Hard Work, Strong, Work

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

Everything, Inherit, Know, Next, Trying, Way

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

Argument, Everything, Interesting, Long

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it.

Empathy, Imagination, Requires, Reverence, Study

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Cherishes, Conservatism, Different, Innovation, Past

Disrupt, and you will be saved.

Disrupt, Saved

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

Century, Grass, Populism, Possible, Progressivism, Roots

A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.

Constitution, Facts, Four, Hold, Pages, Parchment

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

Age, Citizens, Moving, Senior, Useful

In antihistory, time is an illusion.

Antihistory, Illusion, Time

We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.

Brains, Hands, Personalities, Personality, Thinking, Work