Home > Work > The Story of America: Essays on Origins

The Story of America: Essays on Origins QUOTES

The Story of America: Essays on Origins QUOTES

1 " Still, it strikes me that, taken together, they do make an argument, and it is this: the rise of American democracy is bound up with the history of reading and writing, which is one of the reasons the study of American history is inseparable from the study of American literature. In the early United States, literacy rates rose and the price of books and magazines and newspapers fell during the same decades that suffrage was being extended. With everything from constitutions and ballots to almanacs and novels, American wrote and read their way into a political culture inked and stamped and pressed in print. "

― Jill Lepore , The Story of America: Essays on Origins

2 " 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. "

― Jill Lepore , The Story of America: Essays on Origins

3 " History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak. "

― Jill Lepore , The Story of America: Essays on Origins

4 " History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. "

― Jill Lepore , The Story of America: Essays on Origins

5 " Liberals argued for progress; conservatives argued for a return to the nation’s founding principles. Change is a founding principle, too, but people divided by schism are blind to what they share: one half, infallible; the other, never wrong. "

― Jill Lepore , The Story of America: Essays on Origins

6 " Americans came to not only accept that our presidents will speak to us, directly, and ask for our support, plebiscitarily; they began to expect it, even though the Founders surely did not. Tulis and other scholars who wrote on this subject during the Reagan years generally found the rise of the rhetorical presidency worrying. By appealing to the people, charismatic chief executives were bypassing Congress, and ignoring the warnings of—and the provisions made by—the Founders, who considered popular leaders demagogues: politicians who appealed to passion, and not to reason. The rhetorical presidency, Tulis warned, was leading to “a greater mutability of policy, an erosion of the processes of deliberation, and a decay of political discourse.”24 "

― Jill Lepore , The Story of America: Essays on Origins