American - Historian | August 27, 1966 -
In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.
Jill Lepore
WorldLearnYouCitizenKindergarten
Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.
PrivacyKnowEveryoneKeepUsKnown
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.
BusinessRoadsPoliceMedicine
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.
LifeMovingLife Is ATargetGroup
Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.
DieFollowPatternsSpreadBecause
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.
ThreeTwoOutColoniesPaidPassage
Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption.
GodHistoryTimePastGracePresent
History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.
HistoryEarthLostFoundSaved
No nation has a single history, no people a single song.
HistoryPeopleSongNationSingle
Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.
ScienceHistoryPoliticalLate
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.
GovernmentPeopleIdeasProcessUp
Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.
ManagementRulesReplaceThumb
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