"Driving the Demagogues Out of the Barnes & Noble"

"Lepore's pairing of Carmichael and Reagan is telling. Other historians charting the rise of the right have invoked such structural and economic factors as white flight to the suburbs and the rise of corporate-funded think tanks. Her narrative stresses what she views as the ill-advised intransigence of the left. 'With each new form of public protest, Reagan's political capital grew,' she explains. As campus activists 'descended into disenchantment and a profound alienation from the idea of America itself,' Republicans fed off that disenchantment. Conservatism surged, she writes, when liberalism faltered because 'the idea of identity replaced the idea of equality.'"

Daniel Immerwahr at The Nation reviews Jill Lepore's These Truths and This America.

"A Little Less Disruptive Innovation Is Called For"

"Disruption has a totally different history. It's a way to avoid the word 'progress,' which, even when it's secularized, still implies some kind of moral progress. Disruption emerges in the 1990s as progress without any obligation to notions of goodness. And so 'disruptive innovation,' which became the buzzword of change in every realm in the first years of the 21st century, including higher education, is basically destroying things because we can and because there can be money made doing so. Before the 1990s, something that was disruptive was like the kid in the class throwing chalk. And that's what disruptive innovation turned out to really mean."

Evan Goldstein at The Chronicle of Higher Education talks with Jill Lepore about her new book, These Truths.

Change Their Minds and Change the World

"The only scion of a once-grand Boston family, Marston was equal parts genius, charlatan, and kinkster. As an undergraduate at Harvard just before World War I, he was thrilled by militant suffragists like the ones who chained themselves to the fence outside 10 Downing Street. Maybe that's where his fusion of feminism and bondage started—imagery of slavery and shackles abounded in the movement's demonstrations and propaganda. His experiences in the psychology department left their mark, too. Marston was a lab assistant to the prominent Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, a rigid German who opposed votes for women and thought educating them was a waste of time. Münsterberg would surface in the comics as Wonder Woman’s archenemy, Dr. Psycho. ('Women shall suffer while I laugh—Ha! Ho! Ha!') Busy strapping Radcliffe students to blood-pressure machines in Münsterberg's lab, Marston invented the lie detector—a forerunner of Wonder Woman's golden lasso, which compels those it binds to speak the truth."


In The Atlantic, Katha Pollitt reviews Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

"American History Is Messier and More Complicated than We May Prefer"

"'All nations are places,' she writes in her stylish new collection, 'but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable. The story's plot, like the nation's borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Julia M. Klein reviews Jill Lepore's The Story of America: Essays on Origins.

"The First People to Make Politics a Business"

"Political consulting is often thought of as an offshoot of the advertising industry, but closer to the truth is that the advertising industry began as a form of political consulting. As the political scientist Stanley Kelley once explained, when modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, 'So far,' he wrote, 'Big Business has won every skirmish.'"

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker discusses Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, the first professional campaign consultants.

"We Go On to Roll the Dice Once More"

"Around 1806, Britain’s most popular board game was introduced to the United States. Called the Mansion of Happiness, it—like the New Game of Human Life, a somewhat less thrilling predecessor—was based on the idea that life is a voyage in which travelers are buffeted between vice and virtue. In 1843 an American edition was issued. It quickly caught on, selling 4,000 copies in 10 months. The 'mansion' in question was a heavenly one, the final destination for the pious. ('Be virtuous then and forward press, / To gain the seat of happiness,' the rules read.)
"By the second half of the 19th century, a young entrepreneur named Milton Bradley had reinvented the game as the Checkered Game of Life, in which piety took a back seat to prosperity, perseverance led to success, and truth had no value. As Jill Lepore writes in 'The Mansion of Happiness,' a trenchant and fascinating intellectual history of life and death, the new game wasn’t 'a race to heaven,' but 'a series of calculations about the best route to collect the most points, fastest. Accumulate or fail.' In other words, he who ends up with the most toys, wins."

In The New York Times, Dani Shapiro reviews Jill Lepore's The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death.

"The Other Side of Progress Was Poverty"

"George was neither a socialist nor a communist; he influenced Tolstoy but he disagreed with Marx. He saw himself as defending 'the Republicanism of Jefferson and the Democracy of Jackson.' He had a bit of Melville in him (the sailor) and some of Thoreau ('We do not ride on the railroad,' Thoreau wrote from Walden. 'It rides upon us.') But, really, he was a Tocquevillian. Tocqueville believed that democracy in America was made possible by economic equality: people with equal estates will eventually fight for, and win, equal political rights. George agreed. But he thought that speculative, industrial capitalism was destroying democracy by making economic equality impossible."

Jill Lepore in The New York Times recalls Henry George.

"Listen, My Children, and You Shall Hear"

"Meanwhile, historians have pointed out from the start that Longfellow’s poem is, as history, rotten. (Longfellow wouldn’t have cared. 'Nor let the Historian blame the Poet here, / If he perchance misdate the day or year.' ) Before Longfellow wrote his poem about how Revere rode from Boston, warning Massachusetts minutemen that the redcoats were coming, Revere wasn’t known for his ride (his obituary didn’t even mention it). Also, he never reached Concord, and he didn’t ride alone. Longfellow, in other words, got almost every detail of what happened that night wrong."

Jill Lepore in The American Scholar argues that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1861 poem "Paul Revere's Ride" was "less about liberty and Paul Revere, and more about slavery and John Brown."

Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

"We should not be surprised that so many Americans are angry. Almost four decades of growing inequality have left most of them no better off than they were in 1970, and many worse off. The recklessness and greed of much of the financial world—the principal causes of the crisis—have done far more damage than taxes or the deficit. The corruption and dysfunction of Congress and much of the rest of the government have disillusioned many. Everyone should be angry about these injustices, even if no one has proposed a workable solution to them. The Tea Partiers are right to be angry. But the objects of their outcries—taxes, deficits, immigration and supposed violations of the Constitution—are of far less consequence than the great failures that plague the nation."

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe's Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, Kate Zernike's Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, and Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History.

And Gordon Wood reviews Lepore in The New York Review of Books.

Tinkering Taylor

"Taylor is the mortar, and the Gilbreths the bricks, of every American business school. But it was Brandeis who brought Taylor national and international acclaim. He could not, for all that, have saved the railroads a million dollars a day—the number was, as a canny reporter noted, the 'merest moonshine'—because, despite the parade of experts and algorithms, the figure was based on little more than a ballpark estimate that the railroads were about five per cent inefficient. That’s the way Taylorism usually worked."

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker considers the pioneers of scientific management.