Jill Lepore on Traveling through Time

Episode Summary

Executive Summary: Tyler Cowen interviews historian Jill Lepore about how her scholarship connects communication, visibility, women’s history, constitutional interpretation, and technology to a broader theory of U.S. history. Lepore argues against simplistic historical analogies, emphasizes long-term structural change, and is skeptical that privacy, social media, or digital tools have fulfilled their democratic promises.

Main Topics: History as communication across silos (Priority: 5/5): Cowen frames Lepore’s work as uncovering hidden information across fields—literature, comics, legal history, women’s history, and popular culture—showing her as a historian who moves material between silos rather than staying in one domain. Women, visibility, and the history of privacy (Priority: 5/5): Lepore traces modern privacy discourse to late-19th-century efforts by men to shield women from public exposure through photography and film, arguing that U.S. privacy doctrine is historically tangled and often poorly suited to grounding reproductive rights. Celebrity, publicity, and women in public life (Priority: 4/5): Using Mary Pickford, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Amelia Earhart, Lepore explores how the rise of celebrity intensified scrutiny of women and made public speech more punishing for them, a pattern she sees continuing in social media. American history, slavery, and failed national self-understanding (Priority: 5/5): Lepore rejects the idea that America’s early leaders simply miscalculated cultural flourishing; instead she says they ignored slavery’s constitutional centrality, making the nation’s artistic and civic development structurally constrained. Historical analogy and constitutional interpretation (Priority: 5/5): She warns against compressing history into simplistic parallels ('Trump is just like Jackson') and prefers “opening the accordion” to study the distance and transformations between eras. This also informs her critique of originalism. Technology, democracy, and social media (Priority: 5/5): Lepore is skeptical that photography, Silicon Valley, or social media have been as democratically liberating as promised. She argues these tools have intensified direct-democratic impulses and weakened representative politics. Research, archives, and ordinary people (Priority: 4/5): Lepore explains her interest in characters like Joe Gould, Stuart Little, and Jacob Lawrence as ways to recover overlooked histories, especially those of ordinary people and cultural artifacts that reveal deeper social structures.

Key Arguments: Lepore sees history as the recovery and redistribution of information hidden in cultural or institutional 'silos,' not just the narration of elite biographies. The modern right to privacy emerged from men’s anxiety about women’s increasing visibility through new media, so privacy doctrine is historically gendered and conceptually unstable. Reproductive rights would have been better grounded in equal protection or liberty than in privacy, which may have backfired doctrinally. Women’s public visibility has long been punished, and social media may have made the costs of public speech higher rather than lower. The United States could not become the cultural republic some 18th-century thinkers imagined because slavery and the Three-Fifths Clause structurally shaped the nation from the start. Historical analysis should emphasize change over time rather than forcing present-day politics into neat analogies with the past. The Tea Party helped reveal a gap: conservatives speak constitutional language more consistently than liberals, making constitutional claims a politically uneven field. Digital technologies were expected to democratize politics, but their actual effects have not matched those hopes; the key problem may be declining faith in representative government. Photography, especially portrait photography, was once imagined as democratizing because it let ordinary people see themselves as equals, but later technological media have not preserved that promise. Lepore’s work on Stuart Little shows how children’s literature, censorship, and anxieties about sex and birth reflect broader cultural struggles over innocence and adult knowledge.

Data Points: Brandeis and Warren article year: 1890 - They wrote 'The Right to Privacy' in the Harvard Law Review Mary Pickford birth name: Gladys Louise Brooks - Mentioned in discussion of her 125th birthday Mary Pickford era of celebrity: 1920s - Used as a case study for women’s visibility and publicity Comstock law year: 1873 - Cited as the first federal law defining pornography broadly Eleanor Roosevelt book publication year: 1933 - Her book 'It’s Up to the Women' came out during the early New Deal Dickens U.S. trip year: 1842 - He came to the United States in late 1841 / 1842 to tour and earn money Dickens letter/piracy context: International copyright dispute - He sought protection because his work was widely pirated in the U.S. Constitutional Convention bicentennial: 1987 - Thurgood Marshall’s speech contrasted celebration of the document with celebration of struggle since it Dred Scott decision year: 1857 - Given as the canonical example of a notoriously bad Supreme Court decision Lochner decision year: 1905 - Referenced as another decision criticized as 'the worst since Dred Scott' Brown v. Board of Education year: 1954 - Used as part of the lineage of liberal constitutional argument Stuart Little publication year: 1945 - Used in the discussion of censorship and children’s literature Frederick Douglass escape year: 1838 - Referenced in relation to photography and self-representation Daguerreotype arrival in U.S.: 1841 - Douglass sat for a daguerreotype shortly after the medium arrived Doctor Who start year: 1961 - Lepore situates the show in the postwar imagination of time and empire Tea Party/ACA controversy: 2010s - Referenced through the Affordable Care Act ruling and political mobilization

Pivotal Quotes: "I guess I like to think about it in a different structural way than that completely understandable desire to find a historical analogy is just like to take an accordion and compress it to make then just like now." — Jill Lepore: On why simplistic historical analogies distort understanding of the present "The problem is that we have a representative system of government, but we no longer believe in representation." — Jill Lepore: On social media, instant polling, and direct-democracy impulses "I will celebrate the 200 years of struggle to make good on the promises of that document." — Thurgood Marshall (quoted by Lepore): On the U.S. Constitution bicentennial and what should be celebrated instead of the text alone

Implications: Listeners should leave with a more skeptical view of easy historical analogies and techno-utopian claims. Lepore’s framework suggests that democracy, privacy, and public speech are shaped by long institutional histories—and that social media may be stressing, rather than strengthening, representative politics.