Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore for the Library of Congress (2020)

Jill Lepore (born August 27, 1966) is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.

Quotes

• I never set out to study history. I only ever set out to write.
  • Jill Lepore's new essay collection is a bracing exploration of modern history and culture WBUR (August 29,2023)

• Many of the essays engage with the question of written constitutionalism in the United States, meaning, in a specific legal way, that we are ruled by the dead. But a lot of the essays also engage broadly in questions about how memory and devotion and obligation to the dead inform decisions that we make. I don’t think it’s an unshakable hold. And sometimes, as in the title essay (from 2019), that hold is an embrace.
  • Jill Lepore on “the hold of the dead over the living” CurrentPub.com (January 4, 2024)

• 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: Politicians Can Dupe Voters but not Posterity The daily beast (October 19, 2018)