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These Truths: A History of the United States

Book by Jill Lepore · 6 quotes · Death, Politics, War

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These Truths: A History of the United States Quotes

“He wrote of the ordinary soldiers, the 'dogfaces,' and their bravery, and their misery, and the terribleness of their deaths. 'Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules,' he wrote from Italy, describing a soldier who stopped to sit by the body of a captain, holding the dead man's hand. 'Finally he put the hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”

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“In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.”

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“[Europeans lived] in dense, settled populations- cities- where human & animal waste breeds vermin, like mice and rats and roaches. Most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, though, didn't live in dense settlements, and even those who lived in villages tended to move with the seasons, taking apart their towns and rebuilding them somewhere else. They didn't accumulate filth, and they didn't live crowds. They suffered from very few infectious diseases.”

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