These Truths
Metadata
- Author: Jill Lepore
- ASIN: B07BLKWBYT
- ISBN: 0393635244
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B07BLKWBYT
- Kindle link
Highlights
What Vespucci reported discovering was rather difficult to believe. “I have found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa,” he wrote. — location: 469
First time I’ve considered how extraordinary this must have been. The sf trope is meaningful.
In Virginia, George Mason began to have doubts about slavery, sending to George Washington, in December of 1765, an essay in which he argued that slavery was “the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed”—the Roman republic—and warning that it might be the destruction of the British Empire, too. — location: 1791
The best and most expedient strategy, Paine understood, was to argue not from precedent or doctrine but from nature, to insist that there exists a natural right to revolution, as natural as a child leaving its parent. “Let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered — location: 1975
A NATION HAS borders but the edges of an empire are frayed. — location: 4688
GOP — location: 6479
Where’d this come from? Where’d it start?
Populism’s racism and nativism rank among its longest-lasting legacies. — location: 6554
McKinley ran a new-style campaign; Bryan ran an old-style campaign. Bryan barnstormed all over the country: he gave some six hundred speeches to five million people in twenty-seven states and traveled nearly twenty thousand miles. But McKinley’s campaign coffers were fuller: Republicans spent 300,000. — location: 6734
PROGRESSIVISM HAD ROOTS in late nineteenth-century populism; — location: 6943
Populists generally wanted less government, Progressives wanted more, seeking solutions in reform legislation and in the establishment of bureaucracies, especially government agencies. — location: 6950
Thenceforth all workers were required to work at that rate or lose their jobs.47 Taylor, though, had made up most of his figures. After charging Bethlehem Steel two and a half times what he could possibly have saved the company in labor costs, he, too, was fired.48 Nevertheless, Taylorism endured. — location: 7287
but what actually happened was a lot worse: by the end of the decade, managing public opinion would become a business, in the form of “public relations.” — location: 7677
In this reading it is the modes of public relations that have chamged and atomised - our understanding is now constituted differently
During the 1920s, Americans’ faith in progress turned into a faith in prosperity, fueled by consumption. “A change has come over our democracy,” a journalist reported. “It is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.” — location: 7760
“We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. — location: 8628
Polls don’t represent the people, one congressman wrote; Congress does: “Polls are in contradiction to representative government.” — location: 8780
Thomas Dewey, still reeling from his unexpected loss to Truman, damned scholars who “want to drive all moderates and liberals out of the Republican party and then have the remainder join forces with the conservative groups of the South. Then they would have everything neatly arranged, indeed. The Democratic party would be the liberal-to-radical party. The Republican party would be the conservative-to-reactionary party. The results would be neatly arranged, too. The Republicans would lose every election and the Democrats would win every election.”56 Exactly this kind of sorting did eventually come to pass, not to the favor of one party or the other but, instead, to the detriment of everyone. It may have been the brainchild of quantitative political scientists, but it was implemented by pollsters and political consultants, using computers to segment the electorate. The questions raised by Blumer and Rogers went unanswered. Any pollster might have predicted it: POLLSTERS DEFEAT SCHOLARS. — location: 10369
Wh…?
“I will not go and talk to those shitty ass old ladies! — location: 10580
The technology that made it possible to sort citizens by “sex, marital status, education, residence, age group, birthplace, employment, income and a dozen other classifications” would make it possible to sort consumers, too. Businesses found that they could both reduce prices and increase profits by sorting markets into segments and pitching the right ad and product to exactly the right consumer. — location: 10611