180 Quotes by Jill Lepore

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.

Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.

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.

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

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.

[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.

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

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

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.