Jill Lepore Quotes

At Universal Studios, Marston had a hand in films like Show Boat, in 1929. He also helped get films past the censors, including All Quiet on the Western Front, in 1930. When Carl Laemmle's son, Junior Laemmle, took over Universal, he turned it into a specialty shop for horror films: Marston's theory of emotions lies behind the particular brand of psychological terror in Laemmle's Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and The Invisible Man (1933). Before Marston left Hollywood, he also worked for Paramount. For Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), he tested audience reaction by strapping viewers to blood pressure cuffs while they watched the rushes.30

In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock.

Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.

Early Menstruation renders the Uteri Hard & dry; so that they ought not to prompt the early appearance by obscene books, and frequent touchings.

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off.

Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it's actually part of our optimism.

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.

In 1934, after Upton Sinclair was defeated in his campaign to become the next governor of California, he labeled the advertising concern that defeated him a "lie factory." Marston took much the same view. One of Wonder Woman's most sinister adversaries, the Duke of Deception, runs an advertising firm called the Lie Factory.

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

The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.

He eyed his class of Harvard men sternly. "Girls are also human beings," he told them, "a point often overlooked!!"17

'Doctor Who' is the most original science-fiction television series ever made. It is also one of the longest-running television shows of all time.

Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.

We have discharged one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We find only that we forget, when times are good, that times were ever bad.

Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin's granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine - oil on canvas - in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother's house.

He took the trouble to offer "a few gentle Reproofs on those who deserve them," including Harvard students.

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

Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.

When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.

Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.

Americans, among the marryingest people in the world, are also the divorcingest.

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

A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.

The most ignorant young man, who knows nothing of the needs of women, thinks himself a competent legislator, because he is a man," Pankhurst told the crowd, eyeing the Harvard men. "This aristocratic attitude is a mistake.

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.

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.

Massachusetts's poor laws required that boys be taught to write and girls to read.7

An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.

Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.

Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. - William Moulton Marston, March 1945

Either hide this well or destroy it. It was the family motto.

The virtue she valued most was faith. It had no place on Franklin's list. She placed her trust in Providence. He placed his faith in man.

Girls are important: Remember that very few stories are of great interest without the rustle of a skirt.

The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable.
-Professor Charles Homer Haskins

Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.

The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don't think they've ever gotten untangled.

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.

Magazines were new. The Gentleman's Magazine - the first periodical called a "magazine" - appeared in London in 1731. It offered "a Monthly Collection, to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces."3 The metaphor is to weapons. A magazine is, literally, an arsenal; a piece is a firearm.

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

In the end, the judge ruled that no woman has "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception": if a woman isn't willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn't have sex.

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

Girls are also human beings, a point often overlooked.

The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.

As many as two out of every three Europeans who came to the colonies were debtors on arrival: they paid for their passage by becoming indentured servants.

History is only written from what remains.

Clarence Darrow, America's best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history's most skilled orators.

Fiction is the history of the obscure.

'Doctor Who' began as family television: a show that kids and their parents and grandparents can all watch, maybe even together, on the sofa.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid.

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.

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

Marston liked to say that Wonder Woman was meant to be "psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world," but neither he nor Gaines seem to have given much thought to hiring a woman to draw her.

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;

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.

every age has its folly

If he had never created Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston would be remembered for this experiment. He invented the lie detector test. A century on, it's still in use. It's also all over Wonder Woman. "Come, Elva, you'll have to take a lie detector test," Diana Prince tells Elva Dove, a secretary she suspects of spying, as she drags her down a hallway. "I'll ask you questions," Diana says, strapping Elva to the machine while Trevor looks on. "Answer truthfully or your blood pressure curve will go up. "Did you take that rubber report from the secret files?" Diana asks. "No, no!" Elva insists. "Well, I'll be jiggered," Trevor exclaims, reading the graph. "She is lying.

Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.

She was curious, and she could be untoward. But she was dutiful. She was pared to fit.

Weirdly, there have been a lot of critics of conservatism, but very few critics of innovation. As a culture, we are deeply paranoid about politics, but we gaze upon innovation with rapturous adulation.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists, as one feminist explained.

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

Jack Byrne's Fiction House became known for its powerful, invincible female heroes. At a time when many publishers had none, Fiction House employed more than twenty women artists.46 The popularity of comics soared. Gaines, who did not tend to hire women to do anything except secretarial work, began publishing All-American Comics in 1939. That same year, Superman became the first comic-book character to have an entire comic book all to himself; he could also be heard on the radio.47 The first episode of Batman appeared in Detective Comics #27, in May 1939. Three months later, Byrne Holloway Marston, staff artist for the Marston Chronicle, drew the first installment of The Adventures of Bobby Doone.

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.

But everyone tries; trying is the human condition. All anyone can do is ask.

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

The Mercy of some of these Men is Cruelty itself," he wrote. "It were better for us and the Indians also, that we had no Liberty.

When I was a kid, my father would go to our school in the summer to sweep, mop, and wax the floors, room by room, hall by hall, week after week.

In 1911, an "Amazon" meant any woman rebel - which, to a lot of people, meant any girl who left home and went to college.

Draw a woman who's as powerful as Superman, as sexy as Miss Fury, as scantily clad as Sheena the jungle queen, and as patriotic as Captain America.

As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.

I would not have you for to think that I am such a Fool, To write against Learning, as such, or to cry down a School. Still, it would always be an error to count School Learning best.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.

The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.

In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state.

Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.

Feminists in Greenwich Village had begun bobbing their hair in 1912. In 1915, it was still radical. "The idea, it seems, came from Russia," the New York Times reported. "The intellectual women of that country were revolutionaries. For convenience in disguising themselves when the police trailed them, they cropped their hair."2 Holloway was something of a revolutionary, too.

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.

Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.

Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine.

In Middle English, a frankeleyn is a free man, an owner of land but not of title: neither a serf nor a peasant but not a nobleman, either. There

The fight for women's rights hasn't come in waves. Wonder Woman was a product of the suffragist, feminist, and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became a source of the women's liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The fight for women's rights has been a river, wending.

My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.

And that's the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.

Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.

Historians once assumed that when childhood mortality was high, people must not have loved their children very much; it would have been too painful. Research has since proved that assumption wrong.

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

I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.18

Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.

Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.

Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.

Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.

Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present. It's what history and politics share - a vantage on the past - that makes writing the history of politics fraught. And it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence.

Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.

One day, I was playing 'The Game of Life,' the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn't quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different.

One thing that always frustrated me was that, while Benjamin Franklin's was the best-known face of the eighteenth century, no one ever took his sister's likeness.

Wonder Woman' was conceived by Dr. Marston to set up a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; and to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations, and professions monopolized by men. She wasn't meant to be a superwoman; she was meant to be an everywoman.

In antihistory, time is an illusion.