Background
Nicholas Lemann was born on August 11, 1954, in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. He was raised in a Jewish family.
2013
10 Columbus Cir, New York, NY 10019, United States
Nicholas Lemann speaks at the TIME Summit On Higher Education at Time Warner Center on September 20, 2013.
2014
Nicholas Lemann at Education Writers Association 67th National Seminar on May 18, 2014.
2018
476 5th Ave, New York, NY 10018, United States
Nicholas Lemann attends 2018 Library Lions at the New York Public Library in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on November 5, 2018.
300 Park Rd, Metairie, LA 70005, United States
Metairie Park Country Day School where Nicholas Lemann studied.
28 Fernald Dr, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
Harvard College where Nicholas Lemann received a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Lemann
116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
Nicholas Lemann speaks to Columbia University students. Photo by Jenica Miller.
Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Lemann at Columbia Daily Spectator. Photo by Douglas Kessel.
2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
Nicholas Lemann at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Nicholas Lemann with Kate Robinson and his wife Judith Shulevitz.
Nicholas Lemann
Nicholas Lemann
(In the early 1980s, journalist Nicholas Lemann decided to...)
In the early 1980s, journalist Nicholas Lemann decided to find out what had happened to some of the people and places the Standard Oil photographs record. Out of the Forties is at once a compilation of the stories he heard and a portrait of a nation that has seen the strong yet sometimes repressive bonds of family and community give way to the greater prosperity and personal freedom of subsequent decades.
https://www.amazon.com/Out-Forties-Nicholas-Lemann/dp/0932012353/?tag=2022091-20
1983
(Between the early 1940s and the late 1960s, more than fiv...)
Between the early 1940s and the late 1960s, more than five million African Americans left the fields and farms of the Deep South and headed for the big cities, where they hoped to find the economic comfort and legal rights denied them under Jim Crow. This great migration changed the United States from a country where the race was a regional issue and black culture existed mainly in rural isolation into one where race relations affect the texture of life in nearly every city and suburb; it altered politics and popular culture at every level. Nicholas Lemann's narrative concerns the people and lives that were transformed by this migration.
https://www.amazon.com/Promised-Land-Migration-Changed-America/dp/0679733477/?tag=2022091-20
1991
(What do we know about the history, origin, design, and pu...)
What do we know about the history, origin, design, and purpose of the SAT? Who invented it, and why? How did it acquire such a prominent and lasting position in American education? The Big Test reveals the ideas, people, and politics behind a fifty-year-old utopian social experiment that changed this country. Combining vibrant storytelling, vivid portraiture, and thematic analysis, Lemann shows why this experiment did not turn out as planned. It did create a new elite, but it also generated conflict and tension - and America's best-educated, most privileged people now are leaders without followers.
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Test-History-American-Meritocracy/dp/0374527512/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(Nicholas Lemann opens this book with a riveting account o...)
Nicholas Lemann opens this book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This was the start of an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant’ssupport for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed “White Line” organizations was to create chaos and keep blacks from voting out of fear for their lives and livelihoods.
https://www.amazon.com/Redemption-Last-Battle-Civil-War/dp/0374248559/?tag=2022091-20
2006
(In Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explains the United S...)
In Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explains the United States’ - and the world’s - great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras.
https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Man-Decline-American-Dream/dp/0374277885/?tag=2022091-20
2019
Nicholas Lemann was born on August 11, 1954, in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. He was raised in a Jewish family.
Nicholas Lemann attended Metairie Park Country Day School and graduated in 1972. Then he went to Harvard College where he concentrated in American history and literature and was president of the Harvard Crimson. He graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1976.
Nicholas Lemann began his journalistic career at the age of seventeen. He was a writer at the magazine Vieux Carre Courier in New Orleans. After graduation, he was a writer and editor at the Washington Monthly, at Texas Monthly, and at the Washington Post. In 1983 he began working as a national correspondent at The Atlantic Monthly writing about politics, education, business, social policy, and other topics. In recent years there Lemann has written cover articles on the underclass, the War on Poverty, and the history of standardized testing in the United States. Fifteen years later, in 1999, he joined The New Yorker where he works as a staff writer up to now.
In September 2003 Lemann was appointed Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. During his time as dean, the Journalism School launched and completed its first capital fundraising campaign, added 20 members to its full-time faculty, built a student center, started its first new professional degree program since the 1930s, and launched significant new initiatives in investigative reporting, digital journalism, executive leadership for news organizations, and other areas. After a two-year term as a dean, he retired. He wrote widely for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Slate. He also worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., Frontline, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC, and lectured at many universities.
Lemann is the author of books such as The Fast Track: Texans and Other Strivers (1981), Out of the forties (1983), The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and how it Changed America (1991), The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006). These books were reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. His most recent book is Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019). In this book, he traces dislocations in the political economy to developments during the New Deal, at Harvard Business School, and on Wall Street.
(What do we know about the history, origin, design, and pu...)
1999(Nicholas Lemann opens this book with a riveting account o...)
2006(Between the early 1940s and the late 1960s, more than fiv...)
1991(In Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explains the United S...)
2019(In the early 1980s, journalist Nicholas Lemann decided to...)
1983
Quotations:
"In the synagogue Temple Sinai I was raised in, for example, it was this kind of super-Reform Judaism that was no kosher laws, no bar mitzvahs, no tallit, no kippot. We had a choir. It was meant to be like an Episcopalian church, but Jewish, our little realm of Judaism."
"The Atlantic has a national constituency of readers who are interested in high-quality writing about what's going on in the country and in the world, not just in politics and economics but also in their own personal lives. The Atlantic is a single source they can really trust to give them what they want.
"I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a democratic society. It's a challenge for school reformers, like reformers in any realm, to build a popular constituency for their work. If the people it's supposed to benefit vote against it, that tells me that the person pushing reform lacks political skill. And political skill is a good thing."
"Profound question is how do you measure the non-skills component of what goes on in schools: values, curiosity, critical thinking, and so on. That's very tough. Maybe everything worthwhile can't be measured."
"In the current environment, attributing low student performance to teacher tenure is one of the great unproven causal links out there. The relationship just hasn't been examined very carefully, but we should all recognize that in higher education the strongest institutions generally have the most robust tenure systems, and in elementary and secondary, the states with the strongest teacher unions (and tenure systems) tend to have the highest student performance."
"One of the most consistent findings about low performing schools and students is that "home variables" (parental income and education, etc.) are more predictive than "school variables." But, having said that, we as a society can have much more effect on the school variables than on the home variables, so it's important and valuable to focus on the question of which interventions in schools are most effective and which are least effective."
"I think serious research tends to be associated with higher academic quality, more prestige, more resources, and even, heaven help us, better teaching, to a greater extent than you might think. Folks who don't have an active intellectual life become, though the long years of just teaching, less intellectually alive and exciting."
Lemann serves on the boards of directors of the Authors Guild, the National Academy of Sciences’ Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and the Academy of Political Science, and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2010.
Nicholas Lemann married Dominique Browning on May 20, 1983. The marriage produced two sons, Alexander and Theodore. Nicholas and Dominique later divorced. Then he married Judith Shulevitz on November 7, 1999. The marriage produced a son and a daughter.