But if anyone’s up to the task of condensing the whole American shebang into a single readable volume, friends and colleagues say, it’s Professor Lepore, whose productivity and narrative superpowers invite comparisons to the subject of her 2014 book, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” (a stranger-than-fiction comic book origin story that also touched on polyamory, the invention of the lie detector test and early birth control politics). It’s a change of scale for a scholar who built her reputation writing microhistory, which mines small incidents and obscure lives to explore broader cultural themes.
While the book contains reflections on the importance of shared truth to democracy, Professor Lepore mostly focuses on telling the nose-to-tail American story - a “stirring, terrifying, inspiring, troubling, earthshaking epic,” as she sums it up. “It isn’t until you start reading it that you realize how much we need a book like this one at this particular moment,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in a rave in The New York Times Book Review.Īmerican politics have always been infused with claims about American history, but the Trump era has sent debates over everything from the Constitution to the Civil War to the idea of truth itself into overdrive. 18, and weighing in at a whopping 932 pages, could not be better timed, or titled, as reviewers have noted. To not adjust to end there just seemed wrong, like a dereliction of duty as a historian.” “It was just a watershed political moment. “I realized I needed to change the last chapter,” she said. Then came Donald Trump’s surprise victory. A lot of themes were popping right then.” “It seemed like a good landing, not in a partisan way, but as a matter of American history. “I had planned to end with Obama’s inauguration,” she said in a recent interview in her office, deep in the stacks of Widener Library at Harvard, where she has taught since 2003. On Election Day 2016, Jill Lepore was deep into working on “These Truths,” her sprawling new history of the United States (in the middle of her chapter about the Civil War, as it happens). But sometimes, the present has other ideas. Historians can be wary of writing about the present.
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