2
" He wrote of the ordinary soldiers, the 'dogfaces,' and their bravery, and their misery, and the terribleness of their deaths. 'Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules,' he wrote from Italy, describing a soldier who stopped to sit by the body of a captain, holding the dead man's hand. 'Finally he put the hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone. "
― Jill Lepore , These Truths: A History of the United States
10
" History isn’t only a subject; it’s also a method. My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves. I’ve pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness. The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth. "
― Jill Lepore , These Truths: A History of the United States
16
" the question of every rising and setting of the sun, on rainy days and snowy days, on clear days and cloudy days, at the clap of every thunderstorm. Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit? Is there any arrangement of government—any constitution—by which it’s possible for a people to rule themselves, justly and fairly, and as equals, through the exercise of judgment and care? "
― Jill Lepore , These Truths: A History of the United States
