Jill Lepore: evaluation

Transcript context

…And what town did you grow up in? I grew up outside of Worcester, and we came into Boston to see the Red Sox when we could get bleacher-seat tickets. We never did anything else in Boston. The Boston Globe was “that communist rag,” and Harvard was an embarrassment, which all made sense to me at the time. And I think that’s an important background to have, having the experience of going back and trying to write this history textbook. Where that comes from, and how that intersects with my own biography, has been really illuminating to me. In the 1930s, the Left really romanticized ordinary people, right? There’s the great passion for the folk. And in the 1950s, the Left intellectuals decided that the folk had terrible taste, right? And then there’s this incredible cultural contempt for mass culture and television in particular. I remember when I went to college, meeting a lot of people like, “Oh, yes, we didn’t have a television at home.” Because that was the kind of intellectual move of a certain kind of cultural elite . . . Yes.…

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