Over the years, I’ve read a lot of books about history, especially American history. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Anthony Lukas Award.Ī co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come. “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. 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. 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.

But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? The American experiment rests on three ideas-“these truths,” Jefferson called them-political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. 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.

Jill lepore these truths