These Truths: A History of the United States
Jill Lepore
Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.
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0 0No other book has given me more clarity in understanding the sentiments and aspirations of our country. The American experiment began planting its roots in contradiction. Our story began with a quest for liberty, freedom, and self-governance born from the lack of power to dismantle the same slave led quest. At every stage, the ongoing fight for suffrage pit “us” vs “them”. Jim Crow was defeated only to be repackaged in a form suitable for the great society. Our distaste for imperialism was born as our growing command over the free trade market economy spanned the entire globe. Today, a divisive animosity for the elite who have enriched themselves to a level not seen since the gilded age by bending the levers of the economy at the expense of the working class, has culminated in a presidency emblematic of everything this nation wishes to overcome.
“A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that topped a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.”
The entire history of America is each passing generation trying to make the opening line of the Declaration of Independence more real. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The promise of these truths is what fills our greater ambitions and it is what bends the moral arc of the universe towards justice.
As we continue in the fight against the many problems that plague our country, I think of one of the final speeches of Frederick Douglass: “The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.”
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