History Quotes
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The political construct that idealized cowboys fell into disrepute during and immediately after the New Deal. In those years, Americans turned away from Western individualism and toward the idea of an activist government.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, Movement Conservatives have tapped into the idea that an activist government redistributed wealth to lazy minorities. But they have also pushed hard on the idea that true Americans are Western individualists.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
The rise of a new kind of political science in the 1960s has been driving a wedge between political insiders and voters ever since. By turning voters into interest groups, it stopped establishment leaders from articulating a national narrative. It opened the way for Movement Conservatives to create today's political crisis.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
While the government underwrote the West more than any other region, the myth claimed that hardworking Western cowboys and settlers wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to work out their own destiny.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
The fight is over two fundamentally different ideas about the nature of America. On one side are those who believe that that every hardworking person should be able to rise. On the other are those who believe that wealthy white men should always rule over a permanent class of workers.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
In the 1850s, as the numbers of Americans who were not invested in the slave system grew, the South's leaders felt they had to entrench their power in the government or it was only a question of time until lawmakers would begin to regulate, or even outlaw, slavery.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
Men like Abraham Lincoln recognized that if the slaveholders were not stopped, it would only be a question of time until they spread their system of elite rule to the entire country. Poor men would be bound for life into menial labor, and American democracy would die.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
Republicans who controlled the government in the 1920s insisted that national prosperity depended on government protection of the rich, who they believed would plow their capital back into the economy to provide jobs and higher wages for workers.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
By 2015, the top 1 percent of families took home more than 20 percent of income. Wealth distribution was 10 times worse than that: the families in the top 1 percent owned as much as the families in the bottom 90 percent.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts slashes taxes on the very wealthy and kills regulations with the idea that rich businessmen will invest their money into the economy to support workers - the same idea that Republicans embraced in the 1920s.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
Since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan took office promising to scale back the federal government, Republican leaders have promised to cut regulation and taxes, and to return power to individuals to arrange their lives as they see fit. But they have never entirely managed to eradicate the New Deal government.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
Mt. Rushmore was conceived in 1923 in a desperate attempt to draw tourist dollars to a state that had been rushed into the Union to protect Republican political dominance and could not manage to achieve economic stability.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
In 1884, for the first time since the Civil War, voters had elected a Democrat to the White House. Grover Cleveland promised to use the government to protect ordinary Americans, and to stop congressmen from catering to wealthy industrialists.
Quote by -Heather Cox Richardson
Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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 to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Fox News's coverage of 9/11 and the war in Iraq improved its ratings, demonstrated its influence, and intensified the controversy over its practices.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Some people will always think they know how to make other people's marriages better, and, after a while, they'll get to cudgeling you or selling you something; the really entrepreneurial types will sell you the cudgel.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
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.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.
Quote by -Jill Lepore
Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.
Quote by -Jill Lepore