Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is an American historian, journalist, and essayist whose work spans American history, law, literature, and politics.
Born on August 27, 1966, in West Boylston, Massachusetts, Lepore pursued her education at Tufts University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University. That academic formation led her to a career grounded equally in the university and in public writing. She holds the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History chair at Harvard University, where she also works as a university teacher, bringing historical scholarship into sustained contact with broader questions of law and political life.
Alongside her academic position, Lepore has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2005, contributing essays that address American history, literature, and politics for a general readership. Her books include The Name of War and These Truths, two works that demonstrate the range of her engagement with the American past. For her scholarship she received the Bancroft Prize, one of the most significant awards in the field of American history, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, which recognized the sustained quality and ambition of her research and writing.
Across her career, Lepore has returned consistently to the intersection of American history, law, and political thought, examining how the past shapes and is shaped by the institutions and arguments of public life. That preoccupation with the contested meanings of American history runs through both her academic scholarship and her journalism, making the relationship between evidence, narrative, and national identity a recurring concern in everything she writes.
Quotes by Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore's insights on:
Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name.
Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren't often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.
Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that's what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.
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 to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.
The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates – the course of events – over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone’s.
Between 1900 and 1930, the percentage of PhDs awarded to women doubled, and then, for three decades, it fell.6 The gains made by women in the beginning of the twentieth century were lost, everywhere, as women who had fought their way into colleges and graduate programs found that they were barred from the top ranks of the academy. No structural changes had been made that would have allowed women to pursue a life of the mind while raising children: many quit; many were kicked out; most gave up.
The last peace had created the conditions for the next war. Out of want came fear, out of fear came fury.