TheseTruths

Award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore presents a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided America in her most ambitious work yet. These Truths is an urgently-needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history, told in elegiac prose. Lepore argues that the American experiment rests on three ideas – political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people – all of which require a fearless dedication to inquiry because self-government depends on it. Has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?

Beginning in 1492, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News. Along the way, the book is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism.

Americans are descended from a variety of ancestors, including slaves and slave owners, conquerors and the conquered, and immigrants and those who have fought for immigration. Lepore observes that "a nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it."

作者简介

JillLeporeistheDavidWoodsKemper’41ProfessorofAmericanHistoryatHarvardUniversityandastaffwriteratTheNewYorker.HermanybooksincludeTheSecretHistoryofWonderWoman,anationalbestseller,andBookofAges,afinalistfortheNationalBookAward.ShelivesinCambridge,Massachusetts.